About my modest biography, my experiences in the French New Right Circus, etc.
Dear Robert Steuckers, you are among the few
West European journalists or publicists who profoundly understand the history
and geopolitics of Russia. We know each other now since more than fifteen years
and that’s why I find this interview is important. First of all, would like to
introduce yourself, to tell us about your profession, your specialisation, your
titles, etc. ?
RS:
Well, there is nothing special about me. I was born in Uccle/Ukkel in January
1956 in a quite poor family. My father was the son of a peasant having a family
of seven children and came to Brussels to find a job as a servant in 1933. He
didn’t want to go to school to become a schoolmaster, didn’t want to work on
the farm feeding the pigs and couldn’t find a long-lasting job in his province.
My mother, who died recently in December 2011 at the age of 97, was the
daughter of a beer brewer and seller, who, at the age of 14, left his village,
where his own father had also seven children and only one cow he had to drive
along ways and paths in his village in order to let her graze as he had no
meadow of his own. In Brussels my grand-father became the helper of a
My
father came to work as a servant to the House of Count Willy (Guillaume) de
Hemricourt de Grunne in 1938. In the summer of this year he made his first trip
outside Belgium to a village in Franche-Comté, near the Swiss border, where
Count de Grunne had inherited a wonderful mansion house from an aunt who had
inherited it from his own grandfather, the French Catholic thinker and
politician Count Charles de Montalembert. I still spend some days in this part
of Europe twice or three times a year. In August 1939, just a few days after
the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement, my father was called up in the Belgian army,
was sent to barracks near the German border during the phoney war, then to the
Beverloo military camp, where he underwent the German air attack by Stuka
bombers in the early morning of May 10th, 1940. After his duty, as
no Flemish conscript soldiers were taken prisoner of war and sent to Germany,
my father went back to the House of Count de Grunne, where he worked till his
retirement in 1978. Some months later Willy de Grunne died, just three days
before his 90th birthday.
My
youth was spent in the marvellous surrounding Willy de Grunne created in the
large garden behind his house in Brussels, which was a marvel of architecture
designed by the genial Belgian architect Brunfaut in the early Twenties. Willy
de Grunne wanted to have different flowers in his garden in spring, summer and
late summer, so that I always could play among the most beautiful selection of
plants that a team of very able professional gardeners kept with love and care.
The mansion in Franche-Comté is still a marvel today and is now run by his
grandson, whose father was Russian and son of a White Guard officer and later
one of the best teachers of your language in Belgium. The surroundings created
by Willy de Grunne made of me a youth completely immune to the seductions of
modern world, but simultaneously I was perhaps also affected by a serious
handicap: I could never understand the way of working in factories or offices,
with the artificial rhythms and hierarchies they imply.
Now, I
became a so-called “intellectual” thanks to my father’s sister Julienne, who
had a diploma of schoolmistress, had married Hendrik Lambrechts, a Flemish
schoolmaster in ‘s Gravensvoeren (Fouron-le-Comte), and had a son, Raoul, who
after his father’s death in 1949, became a political scientist having studied
at the prestigious University of Louvain, after brilliant secondary school
studies (Latin and Greek) achieved at the Flemish “Heilig Hart College”
(“Sacred Heart College”) in Ganshoren near Brussels. My aunt was very proud of
her son. But unfortunately Raoul died in 1961 from a heart disease that would
now be easily cured. I was only five years old when I was brought to the
University Hospital in Louvain to see him dying after a previous operation that
provoked a blood clot that stroke his brain. The vivid and awful memory of this
dying unconscious young man, his desperate eyes and the frightful calls of his
mother remain in my mind till now. After Raoul’s death my father was told and
even ordered by his sister to make all the efforts needed to let me study at a
University, because, she said, “our old Province Limburg should have an elite
born out of peasant families”. I was given the task, even the burden, to
replace Raoul in the family: a man had been killed, another had to take his
place. Aunt Julienne died in 1991. I saw her some days before her passing away.
She was as happy as happy can be. A bright smile illuminated her face, although
she was suffering a lot due to the dog days: finally, not only me, the crazy
boy full of silly fantasies, had something like a diploma, but also the daughter
of her daughter, who just got her diploma of political scientist at the State’s
University of Ghent. One of my cousins found the right words when she held a
very well balanced speech in the church on her burial day: “A grand and simple
lady”.
These
family circumstances explain why I was first sent to a good primary school in
the part of the City where I’ve always lived. The teachers were severe and
taught us parsing very well, which has been of the uttermost importance for my
further studies in Latin in the secondary school and in German, English and
Dutch for my studies at University or at the Translators’ and Interpreters’
School. After the usual six years of primary school, I was sent to a secondary
school not far from home, where my father, after a good briefing of Aunt
Julienne and of Willy de Grunne, let me be registered in the Latin classes. I
couldn’t understand why I had to study Latin when we both went to this
impressive old school to meet a friar responsible to register the new pupils.
He told me when I asked him why Latin was for that a secondary school is like a
train with several cars, that my seat had been booked in the Latin car and if
after a year or a couple of years I couldn’t feel well in this kind of luxury
or first class car, they would book a seat for me in another one, perhaps less
prestigious but even more efficient and pragmatic. But I immediately liked to
study Latin, especially words and etymologies, and never failed any examination
in this subject. My crux during the years of my secondary school had been maths
not because I had a prejudice against maths —on the contrary— but because in
September 1967, some crazy and criminal minds had decided to introduce “modern
math” (singular!) without any pedagogical preparation: modern math is indeed
too abstract to understand for children younger than 12 or 13 years and I was
only 11 when I started secondary school. I was saved at the end of the first
year because fortunately some clever minds had rung the alarm bell and imposed
algebra in the traditional way.
During
the fifth year, the so-called Latin “poetry class”, I became firmly decided to
learn modern languages, more precisely German and English at University. After
two years I changed for the Translators and Interpreters School, which was not
far from my home. After four years I got the diploma of English and German
translator. To obtain it I had to translate and comment a book of Ernst
Topitsch and Kurt Salamun criticizing “ideologies” as constructed systems that
prevent real pragmatic thoughts to develop or that serve as crushing
instruments to perpetuate the domination of false elites (like the pigs in
Orwell’s Animal Farm) becoming
gradually out of touch.
So I
became successively a clerk by Rank Xerox (to answer calls in several
languages), the dumbfound redaction secretary of Benoist’s magazine “Nouvelle
école” (having had the privilege to analyse on the very field the
preposterousness of the all business lead by this silly old wet blanket of
Benoist), a soldier doing his military service in the 7th Company
Logistics for ten short months in Saive (near Liège), in Marche-en-Famenne, in
the marvellous Burg Vogelsang and the village of Bürvenich in Germany along the
border, a freelance translator and interpreter for twenty years (with a lot of
different customers active in all possible social fields), a sworn translator
for the Ministry of Justice, a private teacher, one among the numerous
freelance assistants of Prof. Jean-François Mattei, who published in 1992 the
“Encyclopédie des Oeuvres philosophiques” for the “Presses Universitaires de
France”, and, as a wonderful and enthralling hobby, the metapolitical fighter
you’ve known since now more than fifteen years. As a metapolitcal fighter, I
was first a young and second-rank animator of the Brussels’ GRECE-group around
Georges Hupin, an occasional pen pusher for his small bulletin “Renaissance
Européenne” (still published nowadays as the organ of Vial’s “Terre &
Peuple” movement in the French-speaking part of Belgium), then the founder of
“Orientations”, the redaction secretary of “Nouvelle école”, one of the
founders of the Brussels’ EROE–group, the founder of “Vouloir” together with
Jean E. van der Taelen, a speaker having wandered throughout Europe to address
meeting or participate to seminars of all kinds, a member of Faye’s “Etudes
& recherches”-club within the “nouvelle droite”, then the organiser
together with others of the Munkzwalm-seminars in Flanders, one among the
founders of “Synergies Européennes” (together with Gilbert Sincyr and Jean de
Bussac) and organisers of all the activities lead by this European group,
including the publication of “Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes” and “Au fil
de l’épée”.
You have a universal
outlook that can be called encyclopaedic. How did you get your education? Whom
can you consider your teachers? Who are the authors and which are the books
that have influenced you most?
If once
in your life you decide to become a metapolitical fighter you have of course as
a duty to read ceaselessly and to acquire willy-nilly this “encyclopaedic
outlook” you talk about. Moreover if the metapolitical purpose you follow is to
re-establish European culture in all its richness the piles of books awaiting
you reach permanently the ceiling. I got my education at school and nowhere
else. It would be dishonest and conceited to invent a story trying to
demonstrate somehow the contrary. Schoolbooks for the subject “History” were
and are still good in Belgium. You have simply to assimilate the contents and
to complete them with further readings. Of course, I owe a lot to our Latin
teacher Simon Hauwaert and our philosophy teacher Lucien Verbruggen, not only
for their lessons but also for the long tours they organized for us in Greece
and Turkey, in order to discover Ancient Greek civilisation. When I was sixteen
and a half, I was brought by the circumstances of these long school trips in
the streets of Athens or Istanbul and visited Ankara’s Hittite Museum just one
day after having had a short tour around Cappadocia’s cave dwellings and
Byzantine churches. This was an even so good training in fact than school
curriculum in itself. Another good thing was that we had to prepare every year
for Hauwaert and his successor Salmon a paper on a classical Latin topic
together with a grammatical analysis of an original text (I had with my late
friend Leyssens, a future gynaecologist, who died in a mountain accident at 42
leaving three orphan sons, to study successively Lucretius’ De rerum naturae, a part of Plinius’
Natural History and Plautus’ theatre). The last year Rodolphe Brouwers, our
French and History teacher, compelled us to write a paper on history: I had to
write a survey about the COMECON countries (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria,
Rumania, Hungary). Brouwers had also the good idea to let us parse in all
details Bossuet’s speeches in order to let us discover the good balance of a
possible barrister’s plea or to be able later to coin speeches along the same
stylistic guidelines in order to let them be better understandable only by
giving them a well-balanced rhythm à la
Bossuet. It has been very useful each time the GRECE-people asked me to
address their annual meeting held in Paris or Versailles. During a first year
at University, I followed the lectures of René Jongen in German grammar and had
a course of German literature by the Flemish writer Paul Lebeau. Later I had
English grammar by Jacques Van Roey, as well as good introductory lectures in
history, among which the ones of Léopold Génicot on the West European Middle
Ages were the most memorable. At the interpreters’ school, two years later, we
had excellent practical trainings in modern languages.
What
concerns the specific New Right literature I was deeply influenced by Pierre
Chassard’s introduction to Nietzsche’s philosophy (“Nietzsche, finalisme et
histoire”), which compelled me to read Nietzsche more critically and to be
definitively defiant in front of all kinds of ready-made idealistic notions
(the ready-made “Platonisms” that lards unrealistic political programs) and to
know that moralistic arguments are too often escapism and rejection of plain
common sense. I had already read Nietzsche’s “Antichrist” and his “Genealogy of
Moral” but I had then as a boy of 14 or 16 no serious guidelines to understand
actually the purposes Nietzsche had by writing this two cardinal books. In
1970, when I was in the 3d class, I asked my French teacher Marcel Aelbrechts
which novels I had to read: all he suggested me was excellent but the main book
in the series was undoubtedly the “Spanish Testament” of Arthur Koestler: so I
got fascinated by English novels not through the English teacher (who at that
time was also an excellent man, Mr. Mercenier) but through the French teacher,
an old mischievous friar, who was certainly not sanctimonious (and with whom I
had a real boxing fight at the end of my studies because he tried to prevent me
to beat the math teacher; we nevertheless remained good friends; normal people
fight and shout at each other: the political correctness says today that such
attitudes are wrong but in no other period of history so many people had to
look for the help of the psychiatrist or to swallow sedating pills; so
“political correctness”, as we can objectively state, is surely bad for your
health…).
My next
French teacher was Jacques Goyens, who is now retired of course and considered
nowadays as a main French-speaking Belgian author. He introduced us to poetry
(Rimbaud, Leconte de Lisle, Baudelaire, Verlaine,…) and to present-day
literature. During springtime 1972, Jean-Paul Leyssens and I worked on Albert
Camus and we stressed mainly his philosophical ideas, inspired by Nietzsche and
written down in “L’homme révolté”. Goyens was disappointed because we had
coined a
In the
translators’ and interpreters’ school we had good grammar and lexicology
teachers like Potelle, Van Hemeldonck and Defrance (who had had a tremendously
active life and had founded one of Belgium’s more prestigious bookshop in
Ostend before becoming a teacher and who brought us to Berlin in 1977 and to
Munich in 1978 during two memorable students’ trips). What concerns more
specifically geopolitics and history, the lectures of Mrs. Costa, based on a
German official handbook, whose title was “Zweimal Deutschland”, provided us a
thorough knowledge in recent German history, which is the key to understand the
process of geopolitical and political alienation in Europe after 1945. The history
lectures of Prof. Peymans stressed the political and philosophical specificity
of the liberal and subversive Western hemisphere (Britain, USA, France), which,
in order to be able to develop, had to get rid of all the traditional
institutions generating the peoples’ identity or of all the “atavistic forces”
as Solzhenitsyn called them while he was defending old Russia against all the
endeavours of the wild Westernization you have endured in your country. During
the two last years in the translators’ school, we had lectures in international
politics and current affairs given by Mrs. Massart, who agreed to let me
comment and introduce Jordis von Lohausen’s book on geopolitics. My destiny as
a “geopolitician” within the New Right groups was settled once for all. Having
read the German “geo-economicist” Anton Zischka about Eastern Europe in order
to be able to write out Brouwers’ history paper in 1974, my non Western vision
of European history was from then on quite complete, as Mrs Costa’s lectures on
recent German history, Zischka’s nostalgia of a united European area without
any Iron Curtain and Lohausen’s Central European vision of history and
geography made me immune for all strictly Western or NATO world visions.
As I’ve already told it to our Scandinavian
friends in an interview they submitted me, historical atlases were important
for me, among them I want to quote the “DTV-Atlas zur Weltgeschichte” and Colin
MacEvedy’s British atlases issued by the celebrated Penguin publishing house in
Harmondsworth, England.
You know some
European languages and make a lot of translations. Why didn’t you study Russian
or any other Slavonic language?
I’ve
got a diploma for the English and German languages. As we spoke Dutch and
French at home and more generally in Brussels’ everyday life, I was quasi born
as a bilingual boy. My school education was in French as most of the Flemish
schools disappeared in the late Forties and early Fifties because the Germans
had supported a policy of “Rückgermanisierung” or “re-Germanization” during
their second occupation. After 1945, the “Germanization” policy, that had been
launched through the financial support for a revival of the Flemish language,
was of course cancelled and the Belgian establishment inaugurated a policy of
“Rückromanisierung”, that decelerated later because people started to send
their children back to Flemish schools again, mostly because they weren’t
attended by so many immigrants. This phenomenon of “Rückromanisierung” was
especially the case in the Southern municipalities of Brussels. My cousin Raoul
could attend a Flemish high quality secondary school in the Northern part of
the urban area. An education in French was not as such a bad thing, of course,
but we thought anyway that, even if French is a very important world language,
the policy of “French alone”, followed by some Frenchified zealots within the
Belgian establishment in Brussels lead to a kind of closeness or isolation, as
Dutch/Flemish is a excellent springboard to learn English, German and Scandinavian
languages. The left liberal and socialist Flemish author August Vermeylen, at a
time between 1890 and 1914 when socialism in Belgium wasn’t uprooted (and an
uprooting force as well) and produced excellent and original cultural goods,
used to say that we had to be Flemings again in order to become good Europeans
(in Nietzsche’s meaning of the phrase). Vermeylen didn’t exclude French as a
language of course but wanted people to open their minds to the cultural worlds
of Britain, Holland, Germany and Scandinavia. In this sense I am a socialist à
la Vermeylen. And my own boy went to a Flemish school, despite the fact that
his mother was born in Wallonia and had to learn Dutch as an adult.
To
learn Slavonic languages at the time of the Cold War was almost impossible as
you couldn’t meet native speakers in common professional and everyday life
surroundings. When I was eleven years old in summer 1967, just after having
achieved primary school, I went to de Grunne’s place in Franche-Comté, where he
had invited “Babushka”, the grand-mother of his grand-children. “Babushka” was
a fantastic elderly woman, who taught the Russian language to her grand-sons
and I helped her to keep them and bring them to a playing area with a toboggan
in the village. During these afternoons, only Russian was spoken! About more
than one year later, I went for the first time in my life to a real theatre (i.
e. not a wandering theatre for school children) to watch an adaptation of
Dostoievski’s “Crime and Castigation”, written by Alexis Guedroitz, de Grunne’s
son-in-law, and masterly performed by the troupe of the famous Belgian actor
Claude Etienne, who played the role of the investigating police principal. This
was not the only Russian presence in my childhood: the wife of our neighbour
was Russian and I played as a boy with their half-Russian children. More: her
father, a former Colonel of the Czar, had an old batman, a giant and handsome
mujik, who worked in their little shop producing children disguises for
carnivals and fancy fairs, as they had to make a living when they came back
like many White Russians completely ruined from Congo where the Belgian
authorities had sent them before this Central African country became independent.
This former corporal batman of the White Army was fascinated by the little boy
I was because —I disclose it here for the first time as I’ve always been too
shy to tell it— I had been elected in 1958 the most beautiful baby boy of
Belgium: this has been my very first diploma but since then I grew old and ugly!
As a simple man, the old Russian White Gardist was very proud to be the
neighbour of the most beautiful baby boy of Belgium and once a week this poor
penniless man bought for me a bar of chocolate in our street’s sweets shop and
put it in the letter box. My mother told me that this was a real sacrifice for
such a poor man and taught me to respect sincerely this modest and kind weekly
gesture of gentleness. But I kept in mind that all simple Russian men were
generous and not avaricious, so I always have picked up denigrating propaganda,
be it the German one of WWII or the NATO one of the Cold War, with an extreme
scepticism.
When I
moved to Forest again in 1983, my neighbour was the celebrated nurse Nathalia
Matheev, daughter of another Czarist officer, who died fighting the Red Army in
Crimea. She was loved by all our neighbours and died just a few days before my
son was born. In her flat, where I live now, many Russians of the Twenties’
emigration came to pay her a visit, especially on Easter Day, when “Paska” and
vodka with fruit juice were served: among them a cousin of Admiral Makharov and
the German-Baltic Count von Thiesenhausen, who at Nathalia’s burial mass, stood
upright at the respectable age of 83 during three long hours, holding a candle
and singing the old sweet Slavonic burial songs, without a single minute of
rest. Nathalia studied nursery in Brussels after having left Russia and was
even sent as a volunteer of the Belgian Red Cross to Peru to manage a health
centre high in the Andean mountains in 1928.
I tried
by my own to learn Russian through an Assimil method when I was sixteen in
1972. I discovered Indo-European comparative etymology in our reference
schoolbook “Vocabulaire raisonné Latin-Français” of the Belgian Latinist
Cotton, where you could find the roots of all the Indo-European basic
vocabulary, so I was inclined at that time to start studies of comparative
linguistics and I decided shortly before the Easter holiday that I
traditionally spent at the Flemish sea resort of De Haan, together with the
future gynaecologist Leyssens, whose grand-father had a house there. I stayed
alone in a charming and cheap hotel as my father loathed to spend weeks at the
sea side: he was a land peasant unable to understand the importance of the sea,
“a space you cannot cultivate and whose water is salty and undrinkable for men
and cattle”. Every morning and every evening, after a complete day outside by
foot or by bike even under the rainy and cold skies of the West-Flemish coastal
district in March or April, I studied a lesson of Russian, another of Welsh and
a third one of Swedish, in order to discover a Slavonic, a Celtic and a
Teutonic language that I didn’t know. This was of course silly —a crazy idea of
a funny teenager— as you cannot study such a spectrum of languages by your own
without a well-established didactic frame and able teachers. So the experience
didn’t last long. At the translators’ school, I started a Danish course but the
extremely sympathetic lady, in charge of these lectures, died two weeks later
and we had to wait for some weeks or months to find a new teacher, who came
only at the very end of the academic year. In 2008, I was offered a free course
of Russian but this initiative, due to several reasons, collapsed rapidly, chiefly
because it couldn’t match into the scheduled and compulsory school activities.
So at the time of the Cold war, it was
easier to learn German and English, two languages that are closer to our own
Dutch and Flemish, in their official varieties as well as in their many
dialects. I could have a better and direct access to these languages than to
Slavonic or Celtic languages. In a speech held at the very beginning of the
academic year 1976 (the day the underground train of Brussels was inaugurated),
Alexis Guedroitz told the assembled teachers and students that Russian was a
language that you can only acquire properly “with your own mother’s milk”. To
study correctly a subject implies not to get rid of the quality of “otium”,
giving you time and pleasure and banking on pieces of knowledge you already and
naturally have, avoiding at the same time painful efforts that could spoil your
life and degenerate into “negotium”, i. e. the feverishness of a greedy
businessman who is never satisfied of what the gods give him. If I can read
—and not properly speak— Latin languages is due to the fact that Simon Hauwaert
was a very demanding Latin teacher. Shortly before my grand-father died in
December 1969, I only had experienced a couple of years in the Latin classes
and discovered next to his old worn-out and brownish armchair a copy of “Oggi”,
a popular Italian magazine —I still cannot imagine how this magazine arrived
there as my grand-father couldn’t understand a single word of Italian— and
stated that I could understand for my own many sentences, thanks to the efforts
of our Latin teachers (Philippe, Dumont, Salmon). Later, when Georges Hupin
opened in 1979 a first office for the New Right/G.R.E.C.E. branch in Brussels,
I could read copies of Marco Tarchi’s leading bulletin “Diorama Letterario” and
of Pino Rauti’s weekly “Linea”, which were among the best the movement produced
in Western Europe at that time. So I decided to try as much as possible to
understand and translate the articles. I took the opportunity between January
and October 1982, when I was out of work and had to wait to be enlisted in the
army, to study the general features of Italian and Spanish, in order to acquire
at least a passive knowledge of these languages; the purpose of this
superficial studying was to get able to gather as much information as possible
from Southern European publications in order to feed the New Right magazines
with original stuff. What concerns Portuguese texts, I had been spoilt by the
publisher of “Futuro Presente”, the New Right quarterly issued in Lisbon at
that time. He came regularly to Paris, when I worked for “Nouvelle école” there
in 1981. We often had the opportunity to have meals together. I helped myself
to read these magazines with a copy of an Assimil method for Portuguese and an
old dictionary.
We started our cooperation at the time you
published “Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes” and animated the groups called
“European Synergies”. Would you like to remind us the history of this
organisation? How did it start?
As you know it, I had been active in several “New Right” initiatives in
Belgium and France since 1974 and became a member of the GRECE-group in
September 1980 after having followed a special summer course in July 1980,
which took place in Roquevafour in Provence. I worked for “Nouvelle école”
during nine months in 1981, came back to Belgium in December 1981 to do my
military service and started, with the help of Jean E. van der Taelen, to
activate a club in Brussels, that was called “EROE” (“Etudes, Recherches et
Orientations Européennes”) in order to be completely independent from the
Parisian coterie around Alain de Benoist and of course to be protected from all
the quarrels and campaigns of hatred he used to rouse against his own friends
and partners, especially against Guillaume Faye. From August to December 1992,
I stated that cooperation with the crazy Parisian pack would be quite
impossible to resume even in the very next future and that all type of further
collaboration with them meant a waste of time, a time we would have spent
arbitrating quarrels between new and former friends of Benoist or defending
ourselves against preposterous gossip. After I had left the 1992 summer course
in Roquefavour earlier, as I was fed up with the quarrels between de Benoist
and GRECE-Chairman Jacques Marlaud, who, after having been insulted in the
worst of all possible ways, was supposed to be prosecuted next to me in front
of a Court composed of Benoist himself, a stuck-up simpleton and a snitch
called Xavier Marchand and the usual godawful yesman Charles Champetier
(nicknamed “His Master’s Voice”). Marchand had to play the role of the
Prosecutor; he tried to make an angry face but was very nervous, his jackass’
look betraying obviously the fact that he was playing a part that had
previously been dictated to him. As a good bootlicker pupil, he did his
homework with application and started to accuse Marlaud and myself, first to
have given articles to Michel Schneider’s magazine “Nationalisme &
République”, an activity that had been forbidden a posteriori, and second to have started a non very accurately
defined “plot” in favour of Schneider (who had no intention at all to plot
against the Parisian bunch but only wanted to give a new life to the group he
once founded, the CDPU [= “Centre de Documentation et de Propagande
Universitaire”], of which my old friend Beerens was the correspondent in
Brussels). After Marchand’s vociferated speech, I simply asked him to repeat
his accusation. He resumed his clumsy plea but the contents of the second
version were slightly different than the ones of the first version: poor
simpleton Marchand hadn’t learned properly by heart his lesson… I said: “Which
is the correct version? If it’s version B, then version A is false and…”.
Benoist, Marlaud and Marchand, all nonplussed by this apparently harmless
question, started immediately to shout loudly at each other, giving the very
amusing spectacle that a quarrel between Frenchmen always is, while Champetier
remained silent and was blowing the smoke of his cigarette up the air. After
they all had uttered their grievances loudly, they left the backyard, where the
trial should have taken place, and only Benoist followed me, repeating
ceaselessly that “he liked me” while he walked heavily with his flat feet
through the marshy meadow next to the river flowing along the park where the
Summer course’s beautiful old mansion stood, disturbing the siesta of a good score of frogs and
toads, that jumped away, cawing clamorously, to escape the hooves of this huge
approaching pachyderm blowing a nasty gas cloud of cigarette smoke. I left the
summer course, telling cocky Marchand, who had made a cock–up of the wannabe
trial, that he should find immediately a car to travel to Aix-en-Provence. As
he of course asked me why, I said that he had to buy an Assimil method to learn
German, as I was about to leave and as he had of course to replace me as a
translator for the German group. He had exactly a couple of hours to become
fluent in German.
I decided to leave definitively in December after they refused to pay me
back the copies of my magazines that had been sold during the annual meeting,
as well as the ones of “The Scorpion” Michael Walker had asked me to sell for
him. I had already the impression to be a clown in a awkward circus but if this
role implied to lose permanently money, it was preferable to leave once for all
the stage. I had the intention to devote myself to other tasks such as
translating books or private
teaching. This transition period of disabused withdrawal lasted exactly one
month and one week (from December 6th, 1992 to begin January 1993).
When friends from Provence phoned me during the first days of 1993 to express
their best wishes for the New Year to come and when I told them what kind of
decision I had taken, they protested heavily, saying that they preferred to
rally under my supervision than under the one of the always mocked “Parisians”.
I answered that I had no possibility to rent places or find accommodations in
their part of France. One day after, they found a marvellous location to
organise a summer course. Other people, such as Gilbert Sincyr, generously
supported this initiative, which six months later was a success due to the
tireless efforts of Christiane Pigacé, a university teacher in political
sciences in Aix-en-Provence, and of a future lawyer in Marseille, Thierry
Mudry, who both could obtain the patronage of Prof. Julien Freund, the most
distinguished French heir of Carl Schmitt. The summer course was a success. But
no one had still the idea of founding a new independent think tank. It came
only one year later when we had to organise several preparatory meetings in
France and Belgium for a next summer course at the same location. Things were
decided in April 1994 in Flanders, at least for the Belgians, Italians,
Spaniards, Portuguese and French. A German-Austrian team joined in 1995
immediately after a summer course of the German weekly paper “Junge Freiheit”,
that organized a short trip to Prague for the participants (including Sunic,
the Russian writer Vladimir Wiedemann and myself); people of the initial French
team, under the leading of Jean de Bussac, travelled to the Baltic countries,
to try to make contacts there. In 1996, Sincyr, de Bussac and Sorel went to
Moscow to meet a Russian team lead by Anatoly Ivanov, former Soviet dissident
and excellent translator from French and German into Russian, Vladimir Avdeev
and Pavel Tulaev. We had also the support of Croatians (Sunic, Martinovic,
Vujic) and Serbs (late Dragos Kalajic) despite the war raging in the Balkans
between these two peoples. In Latin America we’ve always had the support of
Ancient Greek philosophy teacher Alberto Buela, who is also an Argentinian
rancher leading a small ranch of 600 cows, and his old fellow Horacio Cagni, an
excellent connoisseur of Oswald Spengler, who has been able to translate the
heavy German sentences of Spengler himself into a limpid Spanish prose. The
meetings and summer courses lasted till 2003 and the magazines were published
till 2004. Of course, personal contacts are still held and new friends are
starting new initiatives, better adapted to the tastes of younger people. In
2007 we started to blog on the net with http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com in seven or more languages
with new texts every day and with http://vouloir.hautetfort.com
and http://www.archiveseroe.eu/ only in French with all the articles
in our archives. This latest initiative is due to a rebuilt French section in
Paris. These blogging activities bring us more readers and contacts than the
old ways of working. As many people ask to read my own production, mostly
students in order to write some short chapters in their papers or to be able to
write out proper footnotes, I decided in October 2011 to publish my own
personal archives on http://robertsteuckers.blogspot.com/
What are the main goals of “Synergies
Européennes”?
Now the
very purposes of “Synergies Européennes” or “Euro-Synergies” were to enable all
people in Europe (and outside Europe) to exchange ideas, books, views, to start
personal contacts, to stimulate the necessity of translating a maximum of texts
or interviews, in order to accelerate the maturing process leading to the birth
of a new European or European-based political think tank. Another purpose was
to discover new authors, usually rejected by the dominant thoughts or neglected
by old right groups or to interpret them in new perspectives.
“Synergy”
means in the Ancient Greek language, “work together” (“syn” = “together” and
“ergon” = “to work”); it has a stronger intellectual and political connotation
than its Latin equivalent “cooperare” (“co” derived from “cum” = “with”,
“together” - and “operare” = “to work”). Translations, meetings and all other
ways of cooperating (for conferences, individual speeches or lectures, radio
broadcasting or video clips on You Tube, etc.) are the very keys to a
successful development of all possible metapolitical initiatives, be they
individual, collegial or other. People must be on the move as often as
possible, meet each other, eat and drink together, camp under poor soldierly
conditions, walk together in beautiful landscapes, taste open-mindedly the
local kitchen or liquors, remembering one simple but o so important thing, i.
e. that joyfulness must be the core virtue of a good working metapolitical
scene. When sometimes things have failed, it was mainly due to humourless,
snooty or yellow-bellied guys, who thought they alone could grasp one day the
“Truth” and that all others were gannets or cretins. Jean Mabire and Julien
Freund, Guillaume Faye and Tomislav Sunic, Alberto Buela and Pavel Tulaev were
or are joyful people, who can teach you a lot of very serious things or explain
you the most complicated notions without forgetting that joy and gaiety must
remain the core virtues of all intellectual work. If there is no joy, you will
inevitably be labelled as dull and lose the metapolitical battle. Don’t forget
that medieval born initiatives like the German “Burschenschaften” (Students’
Corporations) or the Flemish “Rederijkers Kamers” (“Chambers of Rhetoric”) or
the Youth Movements in pre-Nazi Germany were all initiatives where the highest
intellectual matters were discussed and, once the seminary closed, followed by
joyful songs, drinking parties or dance (Arthur Koestler remembers his time
spent at Vienna Jewish Burschenschaft “Unitas” as the best of his youth,
despite the fact that the Jewish students of Vienna considered in petto that the habits of the
Burschenschaften should be adopted by them as pure mimicking). Humour and irony
are also keys to success. A good cartoonist can reach the bull’s eye better
than a dry philosopher.
In 1997, Anatoly Ivanov, a Russian
historian, polyglot and essayist registered the Russian branch of the “European
Synergies” in Moscow. How did you learn about him?
I don’t
remember quite well but I surely read some sentences about him and his work in
an article of Wolfgang Strauss, who wrote an impressive amount of articles,
essays and interviews about Russian affairs in German and Austrian magazines as
Criticon, Aula, Junges Forum,
Staatsbriefe, Mut, Europa Vorn, etc. The closest contact I had at that time
was with the team of Junges Forum in
Hamburg, which also published next to Strauss’ essays a monthly information
bulletin called DESG-Inform (DESG
meaning “Deutsch-Europäische Studiengesellschaft”). In this context, I received
a copy of a German translation of his very important book Logika Koshmara (Logik des
Alptraums) published in 1993 in Berlin with a foreword and a conclusion of
Wolfgang Strauss, explaining the world view of the new Russian dissidents, who
were not ready to exchange communism for the false values of the West. After
the publishing of Logik des Alptraums,
Ivanov was regularly quoted in the DESG bulletin or in Strauss’ long and
accurate essays in Staatsbriefe. But
the very first contact I had was a letter by Ivanov himself, in which he
introduced himself and sent some comments that we translated or reproduced for Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes or Vouloir. After having received this
letter, I phoned him, so that we could have a vivid conversation. The rest
followed. But I am sad that I never could meet him till yet.
The same is true for Strauss: I should
like to remember here that the very first German article I summarized for
Hupin’s Renaissance Européenne was a
Strauss’ contribution to Schrenck-Notzing’s Criticon
about the neo-Slavophile movement in Russia. I met Strauss only once and too
briefly: at a Summer Course of the German weekly magazine Junge Freiheit near the Czech border in the region of
Fichtelgebirge in 1995. The representative of Russia was then Vladimir
Wiedemann, whose speech I translated for Vouloir.
Since then our magazines ‘Heritage of the
Ancestors” and “Atheneum” have published news about the “European Synergies”,
some of your articles in Russian translation and reviews about such
publications as “Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes”, “Vouloir”, “Nation
Europa”, “Orion”, etc. Do you find such an initiative important? Why?
It is
indeed important to inform people about what happens in the wide world. The
pages “Atheneum” dedicates to the activities of other groups in Europe or
elsewhere in the world replace or complete usefully the information formerly or
still communicated by DESG-Inform,
Diorama Letterario, Nation Europa, Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes, etc.
Recently, i. e. in the first days of June 2011, when I was interviewed in Paris
for the free radio broadcasting station “Méridien Zéro”, the two young
journalists declared to regret the lack of information about what is said,
published or broadcast in the so-called “New Right” or “Identitarian” movements
throughout Europe, since “Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes” ceased to be
published. They both found that the ersatz of it on the Internet was not
sufficient, although one of them produces every week, depending on the topics
they are dealing with, an excellent survey of webpages, books and magazines on
the “Mériden Zéro’s” website. The same kind of intelligent survey should be
done regularly for books because there is one big difference between the time, when
the New Right began to develop at the end of the Sixties and in the Seventies,
and now: many topics aren’t taboo anymore, such as geopolitics or Indo-European
studies at scientific level. Lots of books on the main topics the New Right
wanted to rediscover at the time when such topics were repressed are nowadays
issued by all possible publishing houses and not only by clearly identifiable
conservative or rightist publishers. For general news on current affairs, we
can bank on a German friend to issue monthly a general survey of interesting
topics gathered from the German press and on a Flemish friend for the same
purpose, but this time twice or three times a week. The Flemish “Krantenkoppen”
(= “papers’ heads”) are in four languages (Dutch, French, German and English).
You can jump into the web to discover them regularly by paying a visit to : http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com/. In Italian you can get
daily a excellent collection of articles on http://www.ariannaeditrice.it/. A good survey of the American
non conformist press and webpages can be found on Keith Preston’s site : http://www.attackthesystem.com/. But you and the Méridien Zéro
journalists are right: the instrument should be widened and rationalized. This
one important goal to reach for all those who were formerly confident of the
“Synergies Européennes” network.
You also published articles and interviews
of us all in the bulletin “Nouvelles de Synergies Européennes” and in the
journal “Vouloir”. Had these texts some echo? Who among your readers did pay
more attention to our material and about Russian matters in general? Was it
Wolfgang Strauss, Jean Parvulesco or Guillaume Faye?
All our
readers agreed that our articles about Russia or Russian authors and our
interviews of Russian personalities were of the uttermost importance. Strauss
and Parvulesco received the magazines regularly. I had regular contacts with
Parvulesco, who unfortunately died in November 2010 (cf. The category “Jean
Parvulesco” on http://euro-synergies.hautetfort.com ),
and I know that he always read attentively everything coming from Russia: one
should not forget that Parvulesco was among the first thinkers in France who
were aware of the dangers epitomized by Brzezinski’s strategic projects in
Central Asia and elsewhere, be it along the “New Eurasian Silk Road” or in the
Caucasian and Pontic areas. Articles
like “La doctrine des espaces de désengagement intercontinental” and “De
l’Atlantique au Pacifique” (and within this important geopolitical manifesto,
the paragraphs under the subtitle “Zbigniew Brzezinski et la ligne politico-stratégique
de la Chase Manhattan Bank” – Both texts can be read in “Cahier Jean
Parvulesco”, Nouvelles Littératures Européennes, 1989).
But at
a first stage, we have to thank retrospectively the guy who translated Russian
texts under the pseudonym of “Sepp Staelmans” (a “Bavarianification &
Flemishification” of “Josef Stalin”!). He came to us, when he was sixteen and
we all were still students, and asked to our friend Beerens what he could do
for the movement: Beerens, who in this very evening had most probably drunken
too much red wine, told him: “You should learn German and Russian!”. Incredible
but nevertheless true: the young lad did it! Many other translations were done
by girls who were trainees in my own translation office. More students indeed
study Slavonic languages now than formerly, simply because there is no Iron
Curtain anymore and they can meet youth of their own age in Slavonic countries.
Michel Schneider, who once published the interesting political magazine
“Nationalisme et République”, stayed in Moscow for a quite long time and sent
us articles too. The former readers of Schneider’s magazine welcomed heartedly
of course the Russian stuff he sent to us.
One day
in Paris, just after having jumped out of the train from Brussels, I had a meal
in the famous “Brasserie 1925”, just in front of Paris’ “Gare du Nord”, with a
young lady, an incredibly attractive and intelligent woman seeming to come just
out of the most beautiful fairy tale. She belonged to the team around the most
efficient French present-day Slavists, such as Anne Coldefy, Lydia Kolombet or
Marion Laruelle. They wanted to have copies of all our publications dealing
with Russian topics for their archive.
Many other articles or essays on Russian
matters were inspired by German books of Slavistics produced by the publishing
house Otto Harassowitz in Wiesbaden. This publishing house is indeed
specialized in Russian ideas and topics and issues regularly a thick journal
called Forschungen zur osteuropäischen
Geschichte (= “Studies on East European History”), where we could find many
inspiring texts.
Can we call our own
initiatives as belonging to the transnational “New Right” movement? How would
you define this ideological movement? Who are its leaders?
The
phrase “New Right” has of course many different significations. Especially in
the Anglo-Saxon world it can delineate a rather multiple-faced libertarian
movement inspired by Reaganomics, Thatcherite British conservatism, i. e. an
renewed form of the old liberal Manchesterian way of managing a country’s
economy, etc. The main theoreticians who inspire such a British or
Transatlantic view of politics, state or economics are Milton Friedman,
Friedrich von Hayek or Michael Oakshott. This is not, of course, the way we
would define ourselves as exponents of a “New Right” (although in some
particular aspects, beyond economics as such, Hayek’s notion of “catallaxy” is
interesting).
Personally
I would say that I belong to a synthesis of 1) the German “Neue Rechte”, as it
had been accurately defined by Günter Bartsch in his book “Revolution von
Rechts?”, 2) of the French “nouvelle droite” as it has been coined by Louis
Pauwels, Jean-Claude Valla and Alain de Benoist at the end of the Sixties and
3) of the Italian initiatives of, first, Pino Rauti and his weekly paper
“Linea”, and, second, of Dr. Marco Tarchi and his journals “Diorama letterario”
and “Trasgressioni” before they started sad aggiornamenti in order not to be
insulted by the press.
The German “Neue Rechte”, as defined by
Günter Bartsch, is a bio-humanist movement, opposed to technocracy in the
widest sense of the word, has got a biological-medical view on man (on
anthropology). This implies the rather well-known option for ethnopluralism,
which, subsequently, implies an option for all kinds of “liberation
nationalism”, within and outside Europe, and for a broad conceived “European
Socialism”. The story of the French “nouvelle droite” is better known
throughout the world due to the many essays or books written about it since
more or less four decades but not so much has in fact been written about the
link between, on one hand, the early G.R.E.C.E.-Groups and, on a second hand,
Louis Pauwels, editor
The
Italian magazines were more interested in pure political sciences, even in some
popularized articles from “Linea”, describing mostly the life of important and
original political figures and of political scientists (such as Pareto, Mosca,
Sombart, Weber, Sorokin, etc.) and explaining the main trends of their works.
For us in Belgium the critique the Italian fellows developed to reject
partitocracy was more interesting than the French or German ideas or debates.
Why? Simply because the corrupted situation in which we lived and still live,
the impossibility to realise genuine political programmes and an authentic
reformation aiming at solving actual problems was very similar to what happened
and still happens in Italy: in France, De Gaulle had made it possible to escape
the narrowness of the 4th Republic’s petty politics and had
suggested original ideas such as the workers’ participation, the “intéressement”
of a factory’s personnel in the benefits of their company or a new form of
Senate with representatives of the regions and the professions and not with
aloof professional politicians, who could after some years of parliamentary
life become totally cut from all social realities. Nothing of all these
intelligent projects after him became reality but nevertheless at the end of
the Seventies, there was still hope to translate these seducing programmes into
French political life. In Germany at that time, the full results of the post
war reconstruction could be felt and at that time the country didn’t experiment
the impediments generated by the many dissolving consequences of a
partitocratic system.
The
French “nouvelle droite” acquired a worldwide reputation after a team around
Jean-Claude Valla could manage in the autumn 1978 to man the redaction of a new
and broad dispatched weekly magazine, the “Figaro Magazine”. Alain de Benoist
was among the new journalists selected and took over the “rubrique des idées”
(the “ideas’ column”) he already had run in the Figaro daily paper’s literary
supplement, which was issued every Sunday. Louis Pauwels, the head of the new
weekly “Figaro Magazine” and former chief animator of the “Groupes Planète” had
accepted the deal proposed by the young wolves within the GRECE-team that
proceeded from small national-revolutionist groups, students’ associations and
tiny political parties that had failed to score sufficiently during several
rounds of general or local elections in the Sixties. They all formerly were
more or less linked to the monthly magazine “Europe-Action” mainly supervised by
Dominique Venner. The events of May 1968 proved that the left or all the
leftist non communist caucuses had actually seized the cultural or
metapolitical power in France and elsewhere in Western Europe. Nowadays many
studies tend to demonstrate that the American OSS and later the CIA had created
artificially the 68 uprising in order to weaken Germany which became at the end
of the Sixties an economical and industrial power again and to weaken also
France which under De Gaulle became a nuclear military power having developed a
competitive aircraft industry (Bloch-Dassault with the celebrated Mirage
fighters that had been sold to Israel, India, Australia and Latin American
countries as well as to some European countries such as Belgium). But in a
first step the purpose of the metapolitical fight was to criticize and to
suggest a counter-power to the 68 ideology as well as to defeat the heavy
influence the communists still had in the French press at that time. This
brought the “nouvelle droite” in a kind of precarious balance as, on the one
hand, they still had columns in “Valeurs actuelles” and “Le Spectacle du
monde”, which were publications owned by the press magnate Raymond Bourgine,
who was an Atlanticist, and as, on a second hand, they had started to develop a
thorough criticism of American values in both their separate home magazines
“Nouvelle école” (1975), under the brilliant intellectual leadership of the
Italian Giorgio Locchi, and “Eléments” (1976) under the vigorous supervision of
Guillaume Faye.
Other
ambiguity: Pauwels within the network of the “Groupes Planète” had staunchly
supported some social criticism of the pre-68 movement and stressed the importance
of the more or less Nietzschean notion of “one-dimensional man”, as a possible
aspect hic et nunc of the “Last Man
blinking his eye” whose deleterious influences one had to fight against, as
well as the notion of an “Eros” able to wipe out all the petty consequences of
a hyper-civilized and hyper-rationalized Western world, both notions having
been theorized in Herbert Marcuse’s main books in the Sixties; now, in the
columns of the brand new glossy “Figaro Magazine” (or abbreviated: “FigMag”), all
the effects of the pre-68 and genuine 68 movement were submitted, with the help
of the formerly marginal “pre-new right” would-be journalists, to a thorough
criticism leading to a final and total rejection, in name of a new conservatism
aiming at preserving the values of the West or at least of Old Europe. More
than one theoretical gap between these discrepancies were not filled, leading
in the four or five following years to a quite large array of
misunderstandings. The eternal problem of lack of time couldn’t solve these
discrepancies, leading at the end of 1981 to a clash between de Benoist and
Bourgine, then to a recurrent blackmailing of Pauwels, who was threatened by
attrition in the way advertisement agencies refused to place ads in the weekly
FigMag. The constant blackmail Pauwels underwent aimed at sacking the “New
Right” people and at throwing them out of the “Figmag” for the sole benefit of
the exponents of the new ideological craze, coined by the system’s agencies:
neo-liberalism.
A
Russian “New Right” cannot be of course a tributary of all these Western
European aspects of a general conservative-revolutionnist criticism of the main
modern ideologies or political systems. A Russian “New Right” must of course be
an original and independent stream, a synthesis of Russian ideas. According to
the German Slavist Hildegard Kochanek, the Russian source of a general
conservative revolutionist attitude lies of course in the Slavophile tradition,
taking into account values like “potshvennitshestvo” and “samobytnitshestvo”,
i. e. the roots of the glebe and the genuine political sense of community
(“Gemeinschaft” in German). This implies, still according to Mrs. Kochanek, a
kind of socialism, very different than the historical dominant forms of
socialism within the 1st, 2nd and 3d Internationals, the
West-European social democracies or the Soviet communism. Mrs. Kochanek sees
Vladimir Soloviev and Sergej Nikolaïevitch Bulgakov (1871-1944) as the
spiritual fathers of a spiritualized socialism, inspired by the very notion of
Greek-Byzantine Sophia. Bulgakov, as an émigré in Paris, in the Twenties and
Thirties, was clearly conscious of the lack of ethics in the several forms of
real existing socialisms or communisms. Sophia and ethics help to break the
vicious effects of “economical materialism” of both communist and social
democratic doctrines, which are in the end not fundamentally different from the
utilitarian Anglo-Saxon bourgeois ideology (“burzhuaznost”), as it was
theorized by Jeremy Bentham and later by David Ricardo. Society, according to
Bulgakov, cannot be seen as a mere mechanism of individual atoms trying to
realize their own petty interests. In fact, Bulgakov produced long before the
existence of a “New Right” a complete critique of the Western ideologies, that
Guillaume Faye tried to formulate again —but this time in a non Christian
intellectual frame— in his very first articles on “Western Civilisation”,
published in “Eléments” in 1976, as well as in several articles and short
essays about economical theory (but the main book Faye wrote about his views on
economics was thrown into the wastebasket by de Benoist… I could only save some
pages that I published in my “Orientations”, Nr. 5; the rest was spoilt by Faye
himself, who used to clean his pipe with the scattered sheets…). In the former
Soviet Union, Mikhail Antonov wrote some articles in 1989 in the well-known
Moscovite journal “Nash Sovremennik”, urging the Russian economists not to
adopt the Western unethical forms of economics but to continue Bulgakov’s work
(see: Hildegard KOCHANEK, Die
russisch-nationale Rechte von 1968 bis zum Ende der Sowjetunion – Eine
Diskursanalyse, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1999); in the eyes of
Bulgakov, it is impossible to let economics not be counter-balanced by ethical
brakes. Without such “brakes”, economics tends to invade the whole sphere of
human activities and to destroy all other factual, intellectual or spiritual
fields in which mankind is evolving. Hypertrophy of economics leads to an
extreme “fluidity” of human thoughts and actions: as Carl Schmitt explains it
in his posthumous “Glossarium”, we aren’t Roman surveyors anymore but seamen
writing “logbooks”. He meant that we have lost all links with the Earth.
So we
expect to learn more about Russian ideas through a totally independent Russian
“New Right”, that wouldn’t in no respect imitate Western models.
When
you ask me who are the leaders or the leading personalities of the Western
European New Right, I will have to enumerate country by country the men who
were and are the main exponents of this diversified ideological current. I’ll
only select France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Austria. In France, the leading
personality is of course Alain de Benoist, who seems to personify the movement
in its wholeness. According to Pierre Chassard the core group that intended at
the very beginning to launch a metapolitical struggle and to spread “other
ideas” than those in power was a college of friends, was mainly built by old
members of “Europe Action” or the “Fédération des Etudiants Nationaux”, or even
people having tried initiatives in the Fifties. They selected some younger
collaborators. Alain de Benoist was among the members of this new generation:
he had been selected because he had made good synthesized reviews of books and
magazines and had coined well balanced definitions for “L’Observateur
Européen”, a bulletin which was at the same time the heir publication of the
“Cahiers Universitaires”, the intellectualized publication of a students’
association (FEN – Fédération des Etudiants Nationaux), and later a supplement
to Dominique Venner’s monthly “Europe Action” (“Europe Action Hebdomadaire”).
After Venner resigned in July 1967, a team decided to abandon pure politics and
opt for metapolitics: this was the very birthday of “Nouvelle école”, the
wonderful magazine that seduced me six years later in 1973, when I was only
seventeen. But next to the first emergence of what will become the still
existing “New Right” as a later expression of the prior “Nouvelle école”
redaction, Domnique Venner started the “Institut d’Etudes Occidentales” and a
bulletin called “Cité-Liberté”, but the experience only last a year and a half
(from November 1970 till July 1971).
Later,
some people hoping for a more active approach created the G.R.E.C.E.-Groups,
more or less along the same organizational lines as Louis Pauwels’
“Planète-Groups” in the Sixties, with a representative group in every important
town; these groups were supposed to start a “cultural revolution” to get rid of
the conventional post war liberal ideology and its “translations” in real life;
for the “Grecists”, their similar town-based groups would be called “unités
régionales”. These metapolitical groups had as a purpose to organize locally
speeches, debates, conferences, seminars or art exhibitions to compete with the
dominant ideologies. To inform the members of these new created network, a
bulletin called “Eléments” was launched, very simple in its layout: it was a
plain pile of sheets wrapped in a light cardboard cover. In 1973 it became a
full magazine, not only designed for the members but for a broad public. Both
magazines made Benoist’s reputation in and outside France. For me all positive
aspects of Benoist’s initiatives are directly linked with “Nouvelle école”.
Later Guillaume Faye, a figure of a new “Grecist” generation, gave an energetic
punch to “Eléments”. We may say after four decades of observation that the soul
having animated “Nouvelle école” is undoubtfully Alain de Benoist and that all
his other initiatives are either awkward adaptations to the Zeitgeist or betrayals of the core
message of the initial movement from which he proceeds.
I mean
here that the birth of metapolitics at the end of the Sixties was a clear and
harsh declaration of war against the dominant metapolitical powers and against
all the political systems and corrupted personnel they support: the very aim of
metapolitics is to let appear the dominant power as a full illegitimacy. In
such a long lasting war you cannot make compromises, you never criticize
positions you once adopted, you never negate what you once asserted. On the
contrary you have to spot immediately the new pseudo-intellectual garments the
dominant power is regularly putting on, each time when its usual instruments aren’t
fully efficient anymore; this spotting job is absolutely necessary in order not
to be trapped by the new seducing strategies the foe is trying to spread to
fool you, according to the principles once invented by Sun Tsu. You cannot
criticize positions you once opted for, as if you had to be forgiven for youth
mistakes, because you lose then rather large parts of your operation field. If
you reject, for instance, biology or biohumanism or biological anthropology
(Arnold Gehlen) or all types of medical-biological questions, because you could
eventually be accused by the press to be a proponent of a new kind of
“biological materialism” or of a “zoological view of mankind” or of “racialist
eugenics”, etc., you’ll never be able anymore to suggest a well-thought
national health policy programme elaborated by doctors, who intend to develop a
preventive health system in society. That’s what happened to poor de Benoist,
who was scared stiff to be labelled a “Nazi eugenist” since the very first
polemical attack he underwent in 1970, an attack that wasn’t lead by the left
as such but by Catholic neo-royalists, who had purposely adopted a typical
leftist phraseology and created an ad hoc anti-racist committee to crush the
future “New Right” team they saw as competitors in the new metapolitcal
struggle that was
The further
evolution of the first French “New Right” team involved some years of
interesting developments from 1970 to 1978, with as only outside tribune the
magazines published by Bourgine, “Valeurs actuelles” and “Le Spectacle du
monde” (the famous book of Alain de Benoist “Vu de droite” is a 1978 anthology
of articles having been first published in Bourgine’s publications). The
creation of the “FigMag” in 1978 boosted the G.R.E.C.E.-groups and brought them
into the very debates of the “French Intellectual Landscape” (“Paysage
Intellectuel Français” or “PIF”). This period of intoxicating euphoria lasted
till December 1981. During three years Alain de Benoist thought he had deep in
his tuxedo’s pocket the (metapolitical) key to a very soon available power access
or to a seat in the celebrated “Académie Française” and became incredibly
arrogant and haughty in a typical Parisian way, what was in our eyes a very
funny scene to watch and mock. These arrogant manners of him but also his
exhilarating strokes of near nervous breakdowns, when he was once more scared
stiff for futilities and swallowed handfuls of sedating pills, were very often
aped in Paris, in all the province towns and in the Brussels’ pubs where we met
to discuss the last tittle-tattle of the movement, leading to general hilarity
and merriment. Guillaume Faye was of course the best animator in such merry
meetings. This period was nevertheless the apex of the movement. With the
publication of Faye’s “Le Système à tuer les peuples” and the ideological consequences
of two publications of the group, the special issue of “Nouvelle école” about
America and the American Way of Life and the issue of “Eléments” inaugurating a
thorough critique of Western values, the movement had really broken with the
usual Western and Atlanticist positions of the dominant rightist-conservative
political field. It was now thoroughly different from the old far right groups
on the French political chessboard but became also quite different from the
established official right (the main political parties of Giscard d’Estaing and
Chirac). The movement had its originality. But the world political surroundings
had completely changed. First, the Socialists of François Mitterrand won the
presidential elections in May 1981, a new political synthesis was about to
dominate the world stage, combining the libertarian view of economics with the
anti-Soviet and anti-fascist heritage of the usual Jewish-American East Coast
Trotskites. This meant that the Trotskite intellectual gangs of the East Coast
decided to abandon the usual leftist phraseology and to adopt a new vocabulary
larded with conservative or rightist (anti-communist) expressions. At the same
time, this new conservatism with Trotskite background became the proponent of
libertarian economics and of an aggressive anti-Soviet foreign policy,
destroying all the assets left by the endeavours of diplomacy (the German
“Ostpolitik”, the policy of bilateral relationships between small powers of the
EEC and of the COMECON suggested in Belgium by Pierre Harmel, the independant
policy of the Gaullists and some of their most brilliant ministers such as
Jobert and Couve de Murville, etc.) and re-introducing the geopolitics of
anti-Russian containment inaugurated by the British geographer Sir Halford John
Mackinder in 1904 and later improved by NATO-geopolitics as it had been coined
by Nicholas Spykman and some other geopoliticians working for the American
Foreign Affairs or for the US Army. The new synthesis of economical
libertarianism, anti-communist conservatism and recycled Trotskite thoughts
lead to the election of Reagan and to the introduction of “Reaganomics” in the
United States. Simultaneously, new forms of slightly toned down Reaganomics or
Thatcherite recipes were suggested in European countries: in Belgium the future
Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt, who was at that time a young challenging
politician, started a campaign to let adopt Thatcherite methods in the Low
Countries and a whole bunch of French journalists such as Guy Sorman, Alain Minc
and Laurent Joffrin stood up for adjusting French economics to the new American
or British standards.
The New
Right wasn’t prepared at all to face such a worldwide well orchestrated
offensive; first, its staff was not numerous enough to man all the bastions
where a fierce defence fight was needed and second, under the too preponderant
influence of de Benoist, the topics of economics or economical theory, of
geopolitics and of political sciences and history of political ideas (such as
the genesis of all the possible combinations the US American ideological sides
were able to adopt when they changed their strategies in order to win
elections) had been fully neglected in favour of purely cultural or literary
speculations. In 1979, Giorgio Locchi left the G.R.E.C.E.-Group because he
disagreed with the policy of “entrisme” in the press and in established
conservative caucuses (he meant the “FigMag”-affair and the cooperation with a
think tank of Giscard d’Estaing’s party, called “Maiastra”). At the same time a
group left also the G.R.E.C.E -team to create a so-called “Club de l’Horloge”,
more focussed on political and economical matters but even more predisposed to
“entrisme”-policies.
The
ambiguity was actually present: the G.R.E.C.E./New Right movement was indeed
torn between two possibilities. Either it specialized in pure intellectual,
cultural, literary or philosophical topics or it specialized in political
sciences with both a theoretical branch and a pragmatic one, with the purpose
of translating the theoretical principles into real political life, for
instance by modelling solutions as they would be suggested in a Parliament.
Giorgio Locchi thought it was to early to risk a way or another of “entrisme”;
he was too conscious of the weakness and ill-preparedness of the movement and
estimated that every kind of “entrisme” would lead to a fading away of the
strong philosophical corpus. No actual conservative revolution was possible in
his eyes in 1979 France. The withdrawal of Locchi was a catastrophe. In the
only really scientific study about the “nouvelle droite”, that was written by
Pierre-André Taguieff in 1993, Locchi’s and Mohler’s roles were duly stressed,
as they were rightly considered as the real ancestors of the movement, as
belonging to the small group of the “Founding Fathers” having already modelled
the concept of their wished new conservative revolution in the Fifties:
according to late Professor Piet Tommissen, who unfortunately died recently in
August 2011 just after having written down his own memoirs, Mohler, as a
secretary of the world famous German writer Ernst Jünger, was ceaselessly
organizing meetings and speeches throughout Switzerland and Germany as early as
1952 when the future Flemish university teacher Piet Tommissen met him for the first
time. Locchi was surely as active in Italy. His departure meant that the
movement lost a part of its roots at the very moment when it seemed to have
reached its apex. Alain de Benoist started, consciously or unconsciously, his
strategy of cutting links with the old generation as he would also cut all
links with newcomers in the movement: successively Faye, myself, Baillet,
Champetier, Bresnu and many others were isolated and ruled out, reducing the
movement to his single person surrounded by some narrow-brained lackeys. The
movement ceased gradually to be a real team of good friends working on
different topics, each according to his acquired academic knowledge, to become
the tiny club of a guru with no other purpose that to repeat endlessly its own
static patterns or, even worse, to repeat brainlessly the newly coined aggiornamenti without being conscious of
the contradiction between them and the previous assertions of the guru.
The
fears Locchi had when he contemplated the future with pessimism were about to
become plain reality at the end of 1981. In November 1981 the offices of
G.R.E.C.E. were a real hive of activity in order to materialize the new craze
or the new Machiavellian trick, that was supposed to produce the metapolitical
and final breakthrough of the movement on the French political stage. Some got
the pseudo-Evolian idea to “ride the Tiger” by adopting Reaganomics or
Thatcherite ideas and to smuggle stealthily de Benoist into a team of
representatives of this new monetarist or neoliberal network for which a huge
international conference would be organized in Paris with the support of the
“FigMag”. As de Benoist would be alone among the mostly American or British
monetarist or neo-conservative eggheads of the panel, his would-be Machiavellian
chums thought naively that no one would have smelt a rat that the whole affair
had been set up secretly by the “new right” team. So in the first days of
December an international conference, under the simple and pompous title of
“Alternative libérale”, had been planned. It would have hoisted boastful
Benoist into a network of conservative and neo-conservative political
scientists or economists; our man would gather subsequently high consideration
in the wide world and wouldn’t be taken for a “fascist” or a “crypto-fascist”
anymore. But the whole affair was quickly discovered. The office of
“Alternative libérale” was settled in a flat belonging to de Benoist’s mother
who died some months previously. The very efficient spying network of the
former Trotskites turned “neoconservatives” could rapidly spot who was poorly
hidden behind the flimsy set-up. But the conference rooms had been rented,
folders and pamphlets printed, etc. so that the initiative couldn’t be
cancelled without risking to ruin the movement! Under harsh pressure of Raymond
Aron (who, just like Karl Popper, had been fawned on by Benoist some weeks
before in an article of the “Figmag”), of Norman Podhoretz and of several
neoconservative caucuses from America and France, de Benoist was kicked out
from the conference panel like a tramp who would have lost his way in a luxury
hotel along the Riviera. The conference took nevertheless place with only a
panel of recycled Trotskites, neoconservatives, Thatcherites and other birds of
ill omen. The lesson we should draw from this ludicrous incident is that “Mr.
Nouvelle Droite” has simply no ideas of his own; he is only a poor parrot aping
others’ voices: he imitated Locchi or Mohler when he pretended to be a
“conservative revolutionist” in the German tradition; he imitated some others
when he wanted to participate to any possible “Alternative libérale”; he
imitates a bright feathered queer customer like the Swiss Jean Ziegler when he
plays the role of a “New Leftist” animated by a deep concern for the alleged
“Third World”; he still plays the drama character of the catacombs’ fascist
when he wants to get some dosh from a reduced bunch of old chums who were
former activists of “Europe Action”... He has neither personal ideas nor stable
views and only looks for opportunities to be hoisted on prestigious panels or
to grasp money to pay the bills of his printers. But the funniest result of all
is that the “New Right” teams helped to saddle neo-liberalism on the French
political stage, a neo-liberalism that was closer to its arch-enemies, the
“nouveaux philosophes”, who imposed the newspeak of “political correctness”
during the three last decades, excluding by the way Benoist and his “New Right”
from all official panels. Who were the cheated lovers, the “cocus magnifiques”?
You can easily guess…
When
the conference of “Alternative libérale” was being prepared feverishly, Faye
was puzzled and disappointed. Exactly like Michel Norey, the only member of the
team who had written for “Nouvelle école” (nr. 19) an introduction to an
alternative history of economics, he belonged to a completely different
tradition in the history of economical ideas. This tradition is the so-called
“historical school” having roots in Continental Europe, in Germany as well as
in France. Guillaume Faye, Ange Sampieru and I agreed that the way out of the
liberal Western mess could only be instrumentalized by some revival and
updating of the intellectual assets of the “historical school”. Faye studied
the works of André Grjebine and François Perroux, Sampieru discovered long
before priggish de Benoist the new French anti-utilitarian movement of the
M.A.U.S.S.-team as well as the authors of the “regulationist school” and I
suggested in the Eighties the reading of alternative histories of economical
thought in order to bring didactically some order in our friends’ minds. In
December 1981 I left definitively the Parisian offices of G.R.E.C.E., while
Benoist was brooding and chewing over his failure to become a star in the new
Reaganized and Thatcherized world. The result of this brooding and chewing over
process in “Prig Benoist’s” scattered scatter-brain, the very result of the sad
cogitations of Big Failed Chief, was —I must confess— a wonderful article in
the issue of “Eléments” that was dispatched in France’s kiosks in January 1982.
Imitating both Spengler and Evola, he had given his long and well-balanced
article the title of “Orientations pour des années décisives”, an allusion to
Evola’s booklet “Orientations”, issued in the early Fifties, and to Spengler’s
“Jahre der Entscheidung” (“Années décisives” in French), published as a
bestseller in 1933, the year when Hitler took over power in Germany. Deeply
offended because he had been kicked out of his own December plot and had missed
an opportunity to become a worldwide star, Prig Benoist took positions and
adopted views that were diametrically opposed to the ones usually backed by the
people reading the “FigMag” or the publications of Bourgine’s press group. In
his article, Prig Benoist wrote a couple of sentences that were quite easily
considered as pure provocation by the people in Bourgine’s teams: “We’ll
finally prefer to put on our heads Red Army caps than to finish as fat old guys
eating disgusting hamburgers somewhere in a nasty Brooklyn lane”. Faye,
Sampieru and I found the sentence surely provocative but amusing and very well
written. The result of this whim was that Benoist was immediately kicked out of
Bourgine’s glossy magazines as soon as Boss Bourgine himself could read a copy
of “Orientations pour des années décisives” (Benoist nevertheless could
recuperate his position as a chronicler in “Le spectacle du monde” during the
first decade of the 21st century, long after Boss Bourgine’s death).
It lasted only some weeks before he was also evicted from the highly considered
“Ideas’ column” of the “FigMag”, but as Louis Pauwels was a chivalrous
gentleman, Prig Benoist could keep the “Video column”, where he had to comment
films. The apex era of the French “New Right” was over. Definitively.
The
movement had no bias of “petty conservatism” or of “alternative liberalism”
anymore and cultivated from now on a kind of discrete “national-bolshevism”,
trying openings to non conformist left clubs, just as the German “Neue Rechte”
had done till yet. Sampieru and I were delighted. In January 1982, the second
period in the history of the French “New Right” started. During this
interesting period of decrease in real power or real influence in the media
world but of increase in intellectual maturity, the movement tried to define
itself as an alternative non Western movement, heir of the anti-American
Gaullist positions and of alternative non Marxist socialist thoughts (such as
those of Sombart, Sorel, De Man, etc.). In 1982, the German neutralist movement
became better organized and started to acquire national dimensions it hadn’t
previously had. In 1981, Willy Brandt’s son Peter Brandt had already showed the
way as he had revived the Prussian socialist tradition alongside a big
exhibition about past Prussia in Berlin, the first of the kind that had been
set up after 1945 in the German and Prussian capital. Peter Brandt and others,
among them Wolfgang Venohr, coined a new left nationalism that was seducing us,
in the way that it wasn’t Western-oriented anymore and took into account the
former Prussian/Russian alliances of 1813 and during the time Bismarck was in
office. They rediscovered also the most interesting figure of Ernst Niekisch,
member of the short-lived Soviet republic of Bavaria’s government (1919) and
advocate of a German-Russian alliance against the West in the Twenties and
Thirties, who was sent to jail in Hitler’s time. Behind the historical
recollections that exhibitions, books and essays allowed, there was a thorough
political re-orientation: Germany, if it wanted to be reunified as a neutral
country in Central Europe just as were Austria since the Treaty of 1955 and
Finland since the special agreements with the USSR signed in 1948, had to adopt
a non Westernized pattern of thought. In our eyes, the same was true for all
Western-European countries. I was the first in the New Right group to stress
the importance of this new drift in
When we
started our bulletin “Vouloir”, we decided to transmit regularly information
about what happened and was written in Germany in the wake of this renewed
trend in international and national policy. We acquired the still sulphurous
reputation of being “national-bolsheviks” as we refused to repeat or to take
into positive consideration the usual views that the pro-NATO conservatives
dispatched in the mainstream media. Alain de Benoist observed our activities
very distrustfully but most
This long essay is certainly the best
Faye has ever written. He described the process of Westernization in the all
world. The essay is written in the best French, has a considerable intellectual
depth and poetic punch: the Westernization of our Planet Earth is equivalent to
a dark night in which no one seems to hope anymore for a revival of the
pre-Westernized pluralistic world in Europe or elsewhere. But a deep night is
never eternal, concludes Faye, as there always will be a new dawn. As the
anti-values producing the darkest night cannot subsist in bright daylight, the
values of daylight will be completely different and will be ours, as ours are
diametrically opposed to the ones producing darkness. Faye: “At the time of the
triumphant rise of equalitarianism, of the victorious forward movement of the
Last Man’s mentality, a regeneration of the old European consciousness would
have been impossible. Today, everything changes. The Last Man is settled in
power and he cannot suggest anything else than what is already there. And what
exists seems not to be sufficient”. But “the first light of dawn will appear
after a long time”.
After
having read the typescript of this wonderful booklet, Alain de Benoist got into
a terrible rage and threw it into the dustbin and forbade the publishing
department of the movement to let it be printed. Faye was deeply offended,
disappointed and utterly distraught. He expressed his helplessness in front of
his comrades from Franche-Comté, who read the typescript and found it of course
terrific. One of them, Patrice Sage, decided to finance a first edition of the
booklet not under his own name but under the very name of the publishing
department of Paris, the so-called “SEPP” (“Société d’Editions, de Presse et de
Publicité”), the personnel of which had previously been forbidden by Benoist to
publish the typescript. He considered this generous gesture as a “present” to
the poor “SEPP”-people, who alleged not to be able to afford the task of
printing, publishing and dispatching Faye’s wonderful booklet. In three weeks
time, the booklet was completely sold out! I was the only guy in Belgium who
could get three copies of it. Our late friend Jean-Marie Simar, who had already
published other Faye typescripts like ”Europe et modernité” and “Petit Lexique
du Partisan Européen” (now available in an extended English version under the
title “Why We Fight”) that had also been thrown pitilessly into the trashcan by
furious Prig Benoist, decided generously to finance a new edition. I told him
to be careful, as the booklet had not been printed by Faye or by a one of his
good friends like Sage, but officially by the SEPP, which had sold the complete
bulk without having paid a penny back to Faye. I feared of course that,
although the SEPP hadn’t paid a single penny for the printing and hadn’t paid
any royalties to Faye, they could nevertheless sue Simar for having reprinted
and commercialized a publication of their own. So I travelled to Paris with
Simar to let Faye sign a regular contract with Simar’s small publishing
department, called “Eurograf”. Ten days later, a new edition of Faye’s
“L’Occident comme déclin” was printed. A couple of weeks later, a silly
pettifogging lawyer, sent by this two-faced obnoxious miscreant Alain de
Benoist, phoned me, accusing me of being the editor of the new edition of
Faye’s booklet, because, he said, I was “the man doing everything in Belgium”.
I answered: “You probably mean that I am the King… so you must have dialled the
wrong number…”. I said that there was a contract between Faye and Simar’s
Eurograf; therefore he could only sue Faye for having signed two contracts with
two different publishing houses… But as Faye hadn’t actually signed a contract
with the SEPP and hadn’t been paid any royalties, he was of course free to sign
contracts with others as the law regulating authors’ royalties foresees it in
France. Later another lawyer, who admired Faye’s productions, took up his case
and dismissed the SEPP’s pettifogging goggled lawyer. This incident shows how
contemptible the mentality of Benoist and his fellow travellers is.
After
this farcical and nonsensical incident, the movement went through a series of
crises; first, in 1985, the General Secretary Jean-Claude Cariou, a deeply
honest man wholly dedicated to the movement, was sacked simply because he very
politely introduced a case asking for a better salary for Faye (who earned at
that time 5000 French francs, which was a far too modest salary to live
decently in Paris). The forced departure of Cariou let vanish the organisation
and the logistics between all the local clubs spread throughout the French
territory and abroad. Second, after Cariou’s preposterous and laughable “trial”
staged by Benoist’s fellows in pure Vishynsky style, the official Chairman, an
international leading specialist of Indian mythology,
In
Belgium, we had our own initiatives completely shielded from all the Parisian
circus of hullabaloo and quackery. 1986 was even the best year of “EROE”
(“Etudes, Recherches et Orientations Européennes”), the informal movement Jean
van der Taelen and I set up in October 1983 in order to organize under one
single appellation the series of conferences and speeches we intended to
propose to interested people in Belgium. In 1987 we invited Guillaume Faye
after he had broken with de Benoist, in order to give us a speech about the
so-called “cotton language” (la langue de
coton) or tone-downed “newspeak” he had theorized under the pseudonym of
Pierre Barbès together with the celebrated French strategist François-Bernard
Huyghe. Just one day before the meeting, which had to take place in the
prestigious Brussels Hotel “Métropole”, Benoist let a quick-tempered idiot, he
had previously stirred up and brainwashed, phone me to dissuade me to have
further contacts with Faye. I simply answered that, first, I wasn’t the
official organiser of the meeting (it was Rogelio Pete from the GRESPE-group)
and, second, I wasn’t interested in personal quarrels fought by temperamental
natives abroad, quite far away from Brussels, and that only interesting topics
were stimulating me. “The cotton language” was one of them and therefore Pete,
van der Taelen and I had invited Faye to talk about it. I had no other comments
to utter, I said, and hung up.
The two
years that followed after Faye’s departure were a kind of desert crossing for
the GRECE-movement. In June 1988, I received a letter from a young lad called
Charles Champetier, who wanted to purchase a complete collection of the
magazines I had published (“Orientations” and “Vouloir”) till then. I
immediately phoned him and we decided to see each other at a rally organized by
Swiss friends some weeks later at the occasion of the Swiss national
celebration, during which traditionally people light up bonfires on hills or
mountain tops to commemorate the foundation act of the Swiss Confederation, i.
e. the celebrated Rütli Oath. Champetier was only 18 at that time, had just
been married to a sweet 16-years old girl he had met some months before at a
bazaar fair and had already a beautiful baby son. We had a long conversation in
Switzerland and we took the decision to meet each other in September or October
in Brussels to see what could be done in the now scattered movement. Champetier
published at that time a modest bulletin, whose title was “Idées” and which
popularized the core ideas the GRECE had spread at the very beginning of its
existence. In Brussels, he suggested to become himself a member of GRECE in
order to give a new start to a movement that he admired so much: I answered
that it might be a good step forward but I duly warned him that after the so
many quarrels fought during the last four years the movement had become a
“panier à crabes” (“a crabs’ basket”), where they all were constantly trying to
cheat each other under the supervision of the cretinous twit having a voice
like a foghorn, who had organised Cariou’s trial in 1985 and whom I nicknamed
“Vlanparterre” (= “Wham! Again on the floor!”). Back in Paris young Charles
asked to become a member of the then derelict club around moaning Prig Benoist
and his barking wiseass Vlanparterre. So a new era started in the history of
the core movement of the French New Right. We can call it the Champetier Era or
the third period in the history of French New Right. It lasted twelve years,
from the end of 1988 to the year 2000.
Champetier
rightly thought that the movement needed a full refurbishing, that the core
ideas had to be thought again according to new fruitful trends in philosophy
(the so-called postmodernity) and sociology (the anti-utilitarian movement in
economics and sociology, that had been discovered by Sampieru five or six years
before). His first model was Marinetti’s Italian futurism, which had the will
to sweep the world of thoughts and art from all the petty, useless and
preposterous pseudo-embellishments the Biedermeier or bourgeois mentality of
the 19th Century had added to Italian and European culture in
general. Along similar lines, Champetier wanted to get rid of some boring
ritornellos (“ritournelles”) of the movement’s old guard and to wipe out of
European culture all the ideological rests of a broadly bad understood
Enlightenment. He invited me in June 1989 to talk about postmodernity, not in
the usual way that prevailed in the end, i. e. the postmodern trend that leads
downhill to more vulgar permissiveness and degenerated festivism (Philippe
Muray), but in a way that had been suggested by the real and true old guru of
the European New Right, who was Dr.
During
three years I participated to the activities dynamically promoted by Champetier
and was happy that things were still going on despite the departure of Faye.
These happy times lasted till 1992. During these three years I committed,
without being really conscious of it, an all array of terrible frightful sins.
I did too much. I met too many people. I talked to a lot of old friends, who
could have been seduced by my way of working and could perhaps think of
financing my activities... I was reproached three articles: the one on Welsch’
book on postmodernity, an article asking to investigate the case of French
Right (“Il faut instruire le procès des droites”) and the script of my speech
in Italy during a conference set up in February 1991 by Dr. Marco Tarchi and
Dr. Alessandro Campi in Perugia. I was also blamed for having written several
articles in Michel Schneider’s new magazine “Nationalisme & République”,
as, of course, I had been forbidden to write again for “Nouvelle école” and
“Eléments”, two game areas reserved in all exclusiveness for the personal
essays of Big Prig Guru and for the good boys who obsequiously and childishly
venerated him. And worst of all other sins, I had been hired by Prof.
Jean-François Mattéi to cooperate in a Presses Universitaires de France’s
project to publish an “Encyclopédie des Oeuvres philosophiques”; my task was to
write short didactical essays and establish bibliographies on mainly German
Romantic or Conservative philosophers and on geopoliticians (as the scope was
at that time to broaden the area of “philosophicité” and to include some non
philosophers in the formerly exclusive realm of pure philosophy). Big Prig Guru
was in rage because he personally hadn’t been hired by Prof. Mattéi simply
because he couldn’t be hired as he has no diploma at all neither of a secondary
school nor of a university. This doesn’t mean anything essential as so many
educated idiots circulate around the world but for a University foundation such
as the venerable PUF a sheepskin is inevitably compulsory.
Since
the very day he heard about it, he started to hate me from the deepest corners
of his nicotinized guts, like he most probably had hated in the same way many
other guys before, as Locchi or Faye. The effects of this hatred was of course
more funny than tragic. When I paid my monthly visits to Paris after the PUF
incident, I could immediately notice a changing of attitude by Charles Champetier
and by a newcomer, Arnaud Guyot-Jeannin (nicknamed “Jeannot Toto-Lapin”), a
funny-looking Brylcream
Some
weeks after this short but significant incident, I once more sat together with
Philippe-Nicolas Bresnu just before lunchtime at a nice Parisian terrasse for
the same purpose of dispatching the magazines and Toto-Lapin came half a hour
later to have the noon meal with us and to pick up the publications. He was
very angry, ill-willy, and looked at us with big disapproving eyes, even before
we had uttered a single word, and suddenly after some nonsensical and
low-voiced babbled sentences, he shouted in the middle of the pub, next to the
astonished other guests, “Alain de Benoist is the greatest philosopher of the
20th Century!”. “Maybe” answered Bresnu ironically, “but what about
Heidegger then…?”. Toto-Lapin: “He has only paved the way for Alain de
Benoist…”. We both burst out laughing and Toto-Lapin’s rage become even more
funny as he repeated mechanically like a clockwork parrot what he had asserted
while a poor fly landed on a tuft of hair on his forehead and couldn’t fly away
anymore, as the frail insect was glued in the thick lay of gomina argentina our
Benoistian superfreak conscientiously smeared his hair with every morning
before leaving his luxury flat of the well-off suburb of Neuilly. More and more
nervous, Toto-Lapin went ahead shouting his usual nonsense as the fly was
flapping its wings in a desperate
Bresnu,
many others and myself thought it was high time to leave this ambulant lunatic
asylum, where no sensible conversation was possible and where no clever and
witty guys could be found anymore, except if you would have got the idea of
setting up a vaudeville or a remake of Molière’s “Précieuses ridicules”. The
definite break took place in December 1992, as I explained it previously in
this interview. So the third period in the history of the French New Right
continued till the thankless and ungrateful thrust out of poor zealot
Champetier himself at the end of the year 2000, after his twelve long years of
loyal duty, more, after having sacrificed his best youth years for the
worshipping service of his Master (he had written just before his eviction:
“No, no, He’s not my Master, He is my friend, my Marx” – besides, why Marx? And
not Christ? Or was Champetier at that time of his young years cut out to be a new
Lenin?). Champetier started a new career in some scientific magazines (like
“Bio-Sciences”), dealing with the popularization of biological thought, in a
kind of organic futurist perspective, which was absolutely not preposterous and
potentially fruitful. This hidden life of post-New Right Champetier lasted till
2005-2006; after this period of independent autonomous metapolitical action, he
worked professionally together with another former collaborator of Benoist, who
had also left the movement, despite a key position he had held in the journal
“Krisis”, also lead by Benoist since the end of the Eighties. Champetier had
hoped that “Eléments” would have supported his new post-Grecist activities by
commenting or reviewing his articles or essays. Not a single word was ever
printed in Benoist’s magazines to help promoting Champetier’s editorial or
internet activities after his departure: another proof that Chief Prig is a
real malevolent and ungrateful bloke.
From
the very day Champetier left the “cockpit” of the GRECE-movement, we can talk
about a fourth period, the Post-Champetierite era, around the sole egomania of
the “lider ridiculo”. The start of a fifth period could possibly be stated
since the end of 2010, when things were taken over by an apparently intelligent
young fellow, Pascal Eysseric, who, according to some rumours, would have
Russian roots. The issues of “Eléments” under his supervision seem to be better
balanced, even if they have now absolutely no impact on the “French
Intellectual Landscape” (= “PIF or “Paysage Intellectuel Français”). But wait
and see: how long will this apparently clever guy be able to serve in Benoist’s
scaramouch troop? Is a plot against him already fabricated behind the stage by
bad old geek Vlanparterre? Will he sacrifice twelve years of his healthy and
vigorous youth, like the former yesman Champetier, before being pitilessly
fired? When will he write down the excellent essay that will make Chief Prig
angry and rancorous? The problem with efficient young managers is that they
mostly ignore the sad past of a club or a company when they take it over,
thinking that they are going to heal it from a transient disease, that is in fact
not temporary but chronic with outbursts after apparent respites like by a
patient suffering from malaria.
During
the Champetier’s era, Pierre Vial founded the “Terre & Peuple” club in the
Nineties, that in its initial phases was ruled like a kind of think tank within
Le Pen’s “Front National”. As we weren’t French citizens and as we didn’t want to
start a political movement in Belgium akin to the French FN or to become the
representatives of a party being dominantly of “Old Right” signature, we didn’t
join nor pay any attention to it. It’s only after the break between Vial and Le
Pen that we started to be more interested in this new initiative born out of
Vial’s mind, another historical figure of the French New Right. We all must
admit now that “Terre & Peuple” has reached its full maturity, by
publishing excellent articles about American imperialism and about
globalization and plutocracy. Nowadays as a regularly published magazine, that
you can buy at any newsagent’s shop as well in France as in Belgium, you only
have Dominique Venner’s “Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire”. On the other hand, the
people having founded the “Club de l’Horloge” in 1977-1978 run now under the
supervision of Jean-Yves Le Gallou a very interesting website: http://www.polemia.com/.
Yvan Blot too, a former leading figure of the “Club de l’Horloge”, runs several
websites from which you can download interesting articles interpreting European
political history according to the general Ancient Greek guidelines coined 500
years B.C. at the so-called “Axis period” of history (the phrase “Axis period” —Achsenzeit— was coined by the German
philosopher Karl Jaspers and has been resumed nowadays by the Irish-British
historian of religion Karen Armstrong, who developed and broadened the idea in
her excellent book “The Great Transformation”; Dr. Armin Mohler called the
German “Konservative Revolution” a kind of “Axis Time” in the history of
European political thought as it had been influenced by Nietzsche during the
decades between 1890 and 1930.
It’s
nevertheless a pity that the core movement that started the “New Right” as such
in France isn’t manned anymore by younger people of several generations having
been recruited during the four or five decades of the history of the movement.
All younger people have been ruled out, and the new young people will inevitably
be ruled out when time will come, a deeply diseased system which will condemn
the movement to a silent disappearing within the next fifteen years. Pascal
Eysseric won’t be able of course to find back all those who have been kicked
out and won’t be able either to recruit a sufficient mass of new people as the
mainstream media keep now totally silent about the core group of New Right in
France.
Let us
now examine the “New Right” initiatives outside France. In Germany, when I
started to investigate the scene, it was dominated by three giant figures:
Armin Mohler (former secretary of Ernst Jünger), Baron Caspar von
Schrenck-Notzing (editor of “Criticon”) and Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner. Mohler
wrote for “Criticon”, which was a magazine devoted to all possible currents in
the so-called German conservative stream and in which Mohler could take a third
of all pages to set out his ideas of an “existentialist-vitalist” New Right
that wasn’t exactly on the same line as the bio-humanist views explained by Günther
Bartsch. Kaltenbrunner wrote especially biographies and thematic essays for
widespread collections of small books like “Herderbücherei Initiative”. Later,
Kaltenbrunner’s essays were published in many different volumes. Next to these
three giant figures, we had the Hamburg group around the simply produced
magazine “Junges Forum” of Heinz-Dieter Hansen, mainly interested in people’s
liberation movements in Western and Eastern Europe. In Munich, Hans-Dieter
Sander published “Staatsbriefe”, with lots of articles about Russia from
Wolfgang Strauss, before this former Gulag’s convict ceased all activities due
to age and illness. In Northern Germany, Bernhard Wintzek published the monthly
“Mut” with many articles of Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner. During the two last
decades, Dieter Stein, who at the very beginning of his career, published a
small DINA5-bulletin in a small town in South-Western Germany, managed to
develop it at giant scale and so to create the now prestigious weekly paper
“Junge Freiheit” based in Berlin. To replace “Criticon” after the passing away
of Baron Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing, the historian and theologian Dr.
Karlheinz Weissmann, author of many interesting books around the so-called
“Konservative Revolution” or around several other historical topics, launched
the new high level magazine “Sezession”, together with a former officer of the
scout armoured cars of the West-German army, Götz Kubitschek, and his wife
Ellen Kositza. Their activities are coordinated by an “Institut für
Staatspolitik”, organising one or two prestigious courses and conferences each
year. There are also many other activities in Germany, especially the
publication of many books around topics linked to the wide realm of
“conservative-revolutionnist” ideas.
In
Austria the many activities were of course linked to the German scene but the
magazine of the Students’ “Burschenschaften”, “Aula”, gives us still a more
genuine Austrian view on the usual topics. It is mainly through the Students’
movement that we got in touch with Austrian friends. A group of them came each
time we organized seminars in the Flemish village of Munkzwalm. Genuine
friendship was born. Then a group around Jürgen Hatzenbichler came to the
French Summer courses in Roquefavour. Hatzenbichler, together with Selena Wolf,
had created the small magazine “Identität”, in which ideas of the New Right
were spread. Hatzenbichler unfortunately changed his mind and became a leftist
activist; I cannot explain which were his motivations for such a switch as I
lost all tracks of this very sympathetic young man, who explained me during our
last phone conversation that he could observe from the window of his study a
short but heavy fight along the Austrian-
In Italy you had and still have a well working “New Right” club under
the leading of Dr. Marco Tarchi, a political scientist from Firenze. Even if he
would deny it now, as he became some years ago a distinguished and established
professor, Tarchi owns his genuine way of working to the political activist
Pino Rauti, who died at the end of 2012.
Tarchi belonged obviously to the Rauti’s branch of the so-called
“Italian Social Movement” and decided first to develop more genuinely the
satirical press of the movement and the metapolitical activities within its
frames. By publishing the really “politically incorrect” satirical magazine “La
Voce della fogna” (“The Sewer’s Voice”), Tarchi attracted the more radical
activists. It was the “Sewer’s Voice” simply because the French artist and
activist Jack Marchal created the famous comic figures of the
But there is something pitiful in Tarchi’s person and activities: he is
totally under the silly influence of Benoist, although he is a far more
brilliant thinker and analyst and also a better manager of his publishing
house. He surely belongs to an Italian tradition in political sciences, early
born in the 16th century with Machiavelli and perpetuated by other
high figures like Mosca or Pareto. When Tarchi worked in tandem with another
political scientist from his home City of Firenze, Dr. Alessandro Campi, and
when they published together the seven or eight wonderful issues of “Futuro
Presente” —a perfect clone journal of Benoist’s “Nouvelle école”, what concerns
the lay-out at least, the rest of the essays printed were genuinely original—
they really reached an apex in the history of the Italian New Right. I take the
opportunity here to thank once again Dr. Tarchi for the excellent and accurate
translations he made of my own texts and those of my friends, and that appeared
till 1993 in “Diorama letterario” or “Trasgressioni”.
But now I feel compelled to add some “venenum in cauda” in order to
remain fully objective in my narration of the New Right avatars. I’ve just said
that I considered and still consider Tarchi as far more brilliant than Benoist,
so that I cannot understand his slavish submission in front of his Parisian
shabby master. When I decided to leave definitively the GRECE-movement end
1992, I received some weeks later a furious, stupid and childish letter from
Dr. Campi, who didn’t really know me personally, accusing me of being something
like a naughty heretic for having had a cheek to abandon Prig Benoist and for
allegedly plotting against the Lord of the New Right flies (maybe those very
bugs that are attracted by Toto-Lapin’s gomina argentina…).
Tarchi is obviously a high learned man, whose deep knowledge in
political sciences I respect, but I must objectively add that he behaves
nevertheless in a quite bizarre way in everyday life. Always dressed up with a
sad lightless blue blazer and a white shirt, never forgetting his eternal dark
and dull tie, he looks really like a stuffed up unbearable egghead or as a
lugubrious funeral director. These outfits of him are worn in all
circumstances, even in the hottest Mediterranean summers. One day, I decided
with some other participants to the 1990 summer course in Provence to have a
walk in the mountains surrounding the mansion, where we stayed, in order to
catch a glimpse at the superstructure of the fantastic aqueduct that you can
find at the back of the mansion’s park and to climb high enough along small
stony paths to be able to see the celebrated “Montagne Sainte Victoire” near
Aix-en-Provence and the blue water of the Mediterranean. To be able to perform
this rather easy sports activity, you need of course to wear some comfortable
casuals and shoes and have a solid canvas belt to fix your water flask, as you
cannot walk under the hot sun of August in Provence without taking some water
with you. Tarchi was upset and scandalized to see me in casuals (i. e. a
mustard-yellow T-shirt and linen trousers!) and with a water flask! He
In Spain many activities took place firstly under the supervision of
journalist and author J. J. Esparza, who founded the journals “Punto y Coma”
and “Hesperides”, together with a group of other comrades. These journals were
all excellent and I let translate some of the most brilliant articles for my
own publications. J. J. Esparza is a celebrity now in Spain as he is the author
of two best-sellers: “La gran aventura del Reino de Asturias – Así empezó la
Reconquista” (Esfera de los libros, Madrid, 2010) and “Moros y Cristianos – La
gran aventura de la España medieval” (Esfera de los libros, Madrid, 2011).
These two books are now the myth giving texts to remember all Spaniards the
very core of their history, i. e. a strong will to resist and survive, even against
a giant power as the Muslim world was one in the 8th and 9th
centuries: history is born out of the spirit of people who never capitulate.
Esparza didn’t follow the bad path some of the French New Rightists took in
venerating everything that is Non European or Muslim while developing a kind of
self-hate or “oikophobia”, as it is said now to stigmatize this attitude among
European politicians to invent laws and rules to
During the nine months I worked in Paris as a secretary of “Nouvelle
école”, I had quite often the pleasure to meet for dinner Jaime Nogueira Pinto,
who was the editor of “Futuro Presente”. After my stay in Paris, I’ve never
heard of him anymore, what I regret it sincerely. Later, a Portuguese group
belonged to “Synergies Européennes”, participated actively to all summer
courses and published a magazine “Sinergeias Europeias”, before founding a
publishing house in Lisbon. Nowadays the former leader of the “Terre &
Peuple” antenna in Portugal, Mr. Duarte Branquino, runs a popular satirical
paper “O Diabo”, that you can find at every newsagent’s shop in Portugal,
and animates several websites like “Pena e Espada” while other animate another important site
“Legio Victrix”, which posts many
translation from French, Spanish, Italian and English.
Two weeks before I left Brussels to go to Paris to work for “Nouvelle
école” in March 1981, I had received a letter from Michael Walker who was about
to launch his magazine “The Scorpion” the first issues had as title the
“National Democrat”). Walker was living
in Berlin at that time and earned his life as an English teacher by Berlitz.
Next to a Canadian friend, Paul Thomson, he was the very first man to pay me a
visit at my new office in Paris. We immediately planned common activities and I
participated several times, even once as the chairman, to his annual
conferences in London. Michael with some friends of him had founded a club
called IONA, which was quite active in the British capital in the Eighties. He
and his friends came also to Brussels or elsewhere in Belgium to address
meetings and I had often the opportunity to meet him in France too. After I
left Benoist’s Parisian circus, I learned one hot summer day about a stay of
Michael Walker in the Provençal mansion where the movement’s members regularly
met. Flemish and French friends, who told me about everything that happened
there during the summer courses, told me Michael had had a lot of fun during
his stay over there and described me one of his funniest and most mischievous
misadventures. I wanted to talk Michael more about this joyful summer course
and to invite him to further activities that I planned for the next autumn.
When I phoned, he was very surprised that I knew everything that had happened
in Roquefavour during the summer course and he reacted in a quite bizarre way,
as no one has ever heard about him in New Right clubs after that… There was absolutely
no reason to disappear like that, as Michael did exactly what a German friend
of Hatzenbichler did one or two years before. I deeply regret not to hear
anything more from Michael. Life is sometimes quite cruel. And as far as I
know, “The Scorpion” isn’t published anymore and Michael has no webpage.
Personally
I wouldn’t say that I actually and mentally belong to the New Right, especially
if you mean the French branch of it. I always felt myself as a stranger in
their hectic and often pathological surrounding. It is mainly due to the fact
that the Belgian and French political and ideological systems are thoroughly
different and that you cannot import purely and simply a French system into
Belgian reality, be they Flemish or Walloon. I had thought of course that as an
atypical and a wilful European movement, at least in its declared intentions,
the French New Right could have been a springboard to develop a genuine
Paneuropean movement, i. e. a rallying movement for all those who wanted to
rediscover and reactivate their deepest roots in all the countries whose
populations were from European kinship. I was very often disappointed. I
remember having invited in 1982 at my place in Wezembeek-Oppem people from all
parts of Belgium as well as the main members from the Lille GRECE-group in
order to try to cooperate pragmatically as closely as possible, for instance by
organising common conferences, by inviting the same speakers in all of the main
cities in Flanders, Wallonia and in the two “départements” of Nord and
Pas-de-Calais in order to maximise the impact of the texts producing people we
had among us. First, the stupid, stultified and uneducated (at that time… he
got a diploma for a quite good end paper two decades later when he was almost
60…) leader of the Flemish group in Antwerp, a clumsy worshipper of Big Prig
Benoist, refused to come as he stubbornly refused to be anything else but the
true, only and main vicar of his venerated Chief in our provinces, as he
claimed he alone had the right —because once upon a time he became a rich man
by selling Swedish miracle powders to get wonderful erections or wonder creams
to get big boobs— to invite people to common meetings. Second, another totally
uneducated tosspot, who also foolishly venerated Big Prig and was officially the
head of the Lille “GRECE-regional unit”, wanted to control all the cities where
conferences and speeches would have been held in French under the name of
“Fédération Nord” of which he would have been the almighty chairman. By saying
“Fédération Nord” he upset a representative of the Liège-group, a Walloon
university teacher who asked spontaneously an ironical question: “Why a
“Fédération Nord”? From which entity are we a Northern part?”. He then said
that we could say in Belgium to be a part of the Southern provinces of the
former United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1831) or the Far-Western-Middle
part of the former Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation or, especially in
Liège, the very middle part of the Carolingian core of the early medieval
Austrasian entity or a remote province of the Austrian Hapsburg Empire of the
18th Century. But in no case a new “Northern” appendix of a French
Republic centred on the City of Paris. This incident will in the aftermath
astonish many neutral Flemish observers, accustomed to discover views in the
Flemish movement and literature that were opposed to any unique French
tutelage: it was a genuine Walloon from Liège —whose direct ancestor survived
after having been run over by the Platev’s cossacks the crowd in Verviers
acclaimed as the liberators who repelled Napoleon’s troops— who opposed a total
French control on the New Right circles in the Low Countries and not the
Flemish alleged leader, who slavishly venerated his Parisian master and later
retired somewhere in a lost village in France maybe to have more opportunities
to kiss his Master’s hands and feet in an act of total devotion. He should have
become now an innkeeper in a kind of Gaulish “middle-of-nowhere-hamlet”. Many
Flemish nationalist thinkers have complained during almost a century that the
common Flemish people often have had in history a slavish mentality in front of
French-speaking bosses. This was also true in the main club of the Flemish New
Right in the Eighties of the 20th Century, a club exhibiting proudly
the GRECE-logo on the front page of all its publications, signalling an actual
and total dependence from the initial French club. But the Antwerpian fathead’s
refusal to work closely with us prevented the systematic translation of the
Dutch texts into French or into other languages: the Dutch and Flemish authors
worked subsequently for a narrower audience instead of having the opportunity
to participate to a wider discussion forum spread throughout Europe and the
world. Narrow brains always produce narrow things.
We had
decided after this meeting 1) not to become dependent of the Parisian entity,
2) to accept a common New Right initiative only if voices from France, Germany
and Italy and from other minor countries were heard equally and benevolently as
emanating from a college of pairs and not dominated by the Parisian team around
Prig Chief, 3) to reject the appellation of “New Right” as it was totally
inadequate in Belgium where the word “right” had completely disappeared from
the political vocabulary and had also not very often been used. To judge
critically political matters and to suggest new policies like a shadow cabinet
would do, the French New Right offered almost no intellectual instruments as
Belgian political life is structured in a completely other way. It would have
been better to popularize the Italian matters and topics about partitocracy and
political corruption as the Italian political stage is more like the Belgian,
Austrian and German ones. But the fathead, who sold prick-and-boobs powders and
creams in Antwerp, rejected the idea as, you know, he is a kind of Northern
Viking genius (his powders and creams were Swedish, weren’t they?), even if he
has only the poor narrow shoulders and the half beard without moustache of a
derelict Mennonite clergyman (so that he couldn’t defend himself, just one day
before his second wedding party, when he came out of a shop selling cheap china
dishes…); he would have lost his imaginary rank and title and his alleged
“Northerness” if he would have read, translated and dispatched mean
Italian/Latin texts and books. The result of this cretinous behaviour is that
the Flemish political identitarian movements and parties, that got lots of
votes in the Nineties and till 2004, were never really prepared on intellectual
level to face the dominating partitocracy and couldn’t crack it as Berlusconi
(Forza Italia), Fini (Allianza Nazionale) and Bossi (Lega Nord) did it partly
with the assent of a good deal of the population in the Nineties in Italy (the
operation “Clean Hands” or “Mani pulite”). The new Italian triumvirate of the
early Nineties could achieve the job and largely discredit patritocracy because
they had behind themselves teams of political scientists perfectly drilled in
thoroughly criticizing a corrupt plural partitocracy and able to suggest
practical solutions (see Gianfranco Miglio’s book “Come cambiare” that I let
summarize for “Vouloir” in January 1993). One more metapolitical struggle that
has been lost by the historical “benoistian” New Right…
So, if
you consider yourself to be members of a imaginary world movement called “New
Right” or not, I don’t really care. The important thing for you is to start a
revival of the Narodniki ideas in an actualized way and to remember that the
phrase “conservative revolution” was first coined in Russia by Youri Samarin
and F. Dmitriev in 1875 in a short essay “Revoliutsionny konservatism”. Before
this essay was written, the phrases “conservative revolution” or “revolutionist
conservatism” in Germany had only been quoted without having been properly
defined. It’s up to you to table on this very Russian heritage. Besides, one
should never forget this sentence once written by Dieter Stein: “The notion of
‘New Right’ can arbitrarily be filled by any possible contents, can be
stretched or slackened in all possible directions like chewing gum, so that
malevolent people can suspect (of “fascism” or of any other odd feelings)
everything and/or everyone linked at random to it” (“Auflösung eines Begriffs”,
in: “Junge Freiheit”, nr. 30/2003).
Do you consider Alain de Benoist as belonging to the New Right or to the New Left? Explain your answer…
Well,
he belongs historically and obviously to the New Right as he is generally
considered as one of the main founding fathers of the movement or as the sole
representative of it after all the memorable quarrels that tarnished the four
or five decades long history of the movement. But all know that Benoist is unhappy
with the appellation of “New Right”, that was first given to his movement by
the French weekly magazine “Le Nouvel Observateur” in 1979, as malevolent
journalists often equate “New Right” and “Extreme Right” or even “Fascism”, in
order to wipe out all the potential innovations that a reappraisal of repressed
or forgotten ideas would soon arouse and subsequently suggest other solutions
to present-day affairs. In the French context, the purpose was of course to
prevent the emerging of any possible challenging intellectual club, that could
possibly ruin the established metapolitcal power acquired by the “nouveaux
philosophes” in all the French mainstream medias. These “nouveaux philosophes”
around people like Bernard-Henri Lévy or André Glucksmann were certainly former
leftists or even Maoist thinkers or Trotskite intellectuals and had therefore a
genuine “left” label, even if they never cared really about the actual problems
of the French working class; they developed during the four last decades a kind
of new ideological blend made of
1) anti-communism (by communism they meant the USSR as a
state and a superpower —a “panzercommunist” main power on the chessboard as
they used to say— and the French PCF as a possible anti-American force next to
the nationalist Gaullists) and of
2) American neo-conservatism, exactly as the current
neo-cons in the United States were in former times mainly Trotskite
intellectuals of the East Coast who turned conservative shortly before Reagan
took over power in Washington D.C.
The dominant
ideology in the West, exported by the many NGO’s everywhere in the world, is
now this very mix of
1) disguised Trotskite revolutionism (where the
“permanent war” waged in the area of the “Great Middle East” and elsewehre
replaces the hoped “permanent world revolution” coined in the Thirties by
Trotsky), of
2)
neo-conservatism, of
3)
anti-communism, of
4) neo-liberalism as the most useful and efficient tool
to globalize the world economy and of
5) left-overs of the typical religious puritanism of the
protestant “dissidents” of 17th Century British zealots expelled from England
and sent on ships like the Mayflower to America to found there a “New
Jerusalem” according to their cock-and-bull Biblical views.
This
puritanical protestantism remains the core ideology of the United States (what
some observers call the “American theocracy”) and are responsible for all the
eager fanaticism under “democratic” or “liberal” disguises that the US produced
during recent history and that outbalanced the traditional way of practicing
diplomacy. It also explains why the United States are the best allies of the
worst Wahhabite islamists in parts of the world like Libya, Chechnya or Syria.
There is a global plot of all the most obscure fundamentalists against all
normal political conditions in the world, as they have been derived from
Aristoteles’ philosophy in the Catholic, Byzantine-Orthodox and Islamic
(Ottomanic and Persian) civilisational realms. Against Aristotelician political
and pagan realism, Puritans of dissident Protestant provenience, Wahhabite
Muslims, Jewish zealots and Trotskite chaotic revolutionnists are constantly
rebelling, creating permanently instability on the world chessboard that should
according to Kissinger, Brzezinski or the Clintons (wife and husband) be
totally turned upside down.
In
front of this mainstream new dominant ideology in France, the pseudo-rational
purpose of de Benoist is to avoid being labeled a “Fascist” or being accused of
supporting in a way or another Le Pen’s National Front so that he could be
accepted as a full legitimated partner in fake pluralist debates in the press
or on television, where he would play the role of a gentle “non-conformist” who
could perhaps lightly
As you
cannot find the magazine “Eléments” anymore since at least twenty years in
Belgian newsagents’ shops, I have to buy my copies in France when I travel in some
parts of this neighbor country. In November 2010 I found a copy of the then
last issue in Nancy, where my wife likes to have a delicious cup of coffee on
the celebrated “Place Stanislas” and to do some shopping. I unfortunately lost
this issue somewhere during the rest of my travel through France, Switzerland
and Germany (I visited Heidegger’s favorite holiday place in Todtnauberg where
this world famous Black Forest philosopher wrote a good deal of his books). In
this issue, Stuffed Shirt Alain de Benoist tried to demonstrate that the “New
Right” was in fact the real “New Left” and the true inheritor of Marx’ ideas as
well as the devoted intellectual protector of the masses of African and Muslim
immigrants against the centralization and assimilation efforts of the alleged
“xenophobic” French State’s system, while the “New Left” was genuinely a
neo-conservative islamophobe movement or had become gradually such a faction,
due to the blend first with “Reaganism” and second with neo-conservatism under
Bush Senior and Bush Junior and maybe also with the Zionist Likud ideology. His
old silly chum Michel Marmin, in the same issue, asserted that the New Right,
somehow contrary to Maurras’ views at the beginning of the 20th Century, was a
movement inspired by Immanuel Kant (and why not by Mother Theresa from Calcutta
or Father Christmas from a heavens’ portion above Lapland...?).
The
exercise of proving that Left is Right and vice-versa could be very
entertaining and philosophically challenging, provided it would have been
written in a humorous style. It was not. Prig Benoist wrote all that very
seriously, in the credulous hope he would have been finally taken as a genuine
leftist by the Left and would have transformed his alleged false rightist young
fellows in true new leftists more leftist than the usual leftists (Do you
follow...?). Such an attempt is of course preposterous. Prig Benoist and Aloof
Marmin tried to sell the wide public opinion the absurd story that they were in
fact the only actual New Left and that nobody in the world could grasp it till
yet... But would ultimately grasp it now, once all clever minds all over the
world would have read the brittle pseudo-intellectualized demonstration printed
in “Eléments”.
The
problem is that they cannot be labeled “New Left” as they never had any
historical connection with, for instance, the “Frankfurter Schule” or with any
other of its subsidiaries like for instance the group around Ernst Bloch and
Rudy Dutschke or, in France, with clubs around Sartre’s “Les Temps Modernes” or
with the Christian personalist caucuses around Jacques Maritain or Emmanuel
Mounier and their journal “Esprit” (even if Benoist participated in a debate
with their late heir Jean-Marie Domenach in 1993; I think Domenach also wrote
an article for Benoist’s third magazine, “Krisis” but cooperation ended quite
soon with that single piece of writing). Benoist is almost 70 now: I think that
it is too late for him now to change views and that it would also be completely
silly to play the role of a kind of ageing pagan leftist Saint Paul, converting
to the faith of his former foes on an imaginary way to an even illusory
Damascus (or is the joy of putting one’s flabby bottom on the armchair of a
television studio worth all denials...?).
I think
that, due to these nonsensical exercises by which Prig Benoist still tries to
find a position as a now allegedly mature man, he is finally nowhere anymore as
his recurrent “aggiornamenti” produced only confusion and puzzlement first in
his own flibbertigibbet brain and second in his readers’ minds (be they
friendly towards his initiatives or not). Fact is that he is a pathological
coward and that he invents constantly new intellectual constructions that he
doesn’t understand properly himself as he is finally a poor awkward philosopher
(Faye used to say: a “scissors-and-paste thinker”), simply because he is
permanently scared witless to be once more insulted by adverse gannets as a
“Rightist” or even worse as an “extreme Rightist”, a “Fascist” or a “Nazi”. As I
once wrote: “Fear is a bad adviser”. Indeed you cannot achieve anything if
you’re pathologically dominated by fear (Benoist couldn’t properly understand
what Evola or Jünger —his alleged favorite authors whose numerous books he
claims to have read and meditated in order to absorb literally all their
thoughts— told us masterfully about fear and fearlessness, be it as an alpinist
in the mountains around the Lyskamm, a soldier in the WW1 trenches or a reader
of martial Buddhist texts).
After
all, Benoist can call himself as he wants to be called; it would only be one
more ludicrous sketch in the long vaudeville à la de Funès of which his
personal existence and his personal feelings were parts. Only the poor
Pierre-André Taguieff had once upon a time, when he was writing a book about
the “nouvelle droite”, the weakness of believing the self-concocted fiction
that Benoist is hawking about himself, fabricating the fable of a serious
intellectual, reading heaps of books since his caring childhood, while he is often
only a substandard “feuilletonist” and a plagiarist. When Taguieff heard one
day the truth about Benoist’s failures in the Lycée where he studied as a
teenager, failures that of course Chief Prig had stupidly concealed as we all
had failures as teenagers or as students, he phoned me while he was beside
himself and complained that he had been abused...
How did you get to
know Alexander Dugin? What is your opinion about his works and his Eurasian
ideology? Are you still in contact with him?
I met
Dugin for the first time in 1990 in a Parisian bookshop. It was still a time
when you almost never met Russian people in Western Europe, except in compact
groups duly coached by guides and interpreters, as we did for instance in
Lübeck, Germany, in Spring 1979. You also could recognize Soviet citizens at
their clothes as there wasn’t yet a standardization of garments like in
present-day globalized world. When I heard a Russian man and his wife talking
with the usual charming Russian accent, I got immediately the impression that
the person in front of the bookshop’s desk was Dugin himself. He had already
written a couple of letters to me and, also of course due to Wolfgang Strauss’
articles, I knew already quite a lot about him. I went straight to him and
asked: “You are Alexander Dugin, I presume...?”. He looked very afraid as if I
had been a policeman in plain clothes. But I introduced myself and we had a
long and friendly conversation in a pub. Later I interviewed him for “Vouloir”.
He also held a speech at a GRECE annual meeting in 1991. About one year later,
he invited Benoist and myself to Moscow where we met personalities like
Guennadi Zyouganov and Alexander Prokhanov, former editor of “Lettres
soviétiques”, who had published the very first complete issue of a Soviet
magazine dedicated to Dostoievski. Beerens and I could buy copies of it in
Brussels in 1982 (if I remember well...), together with a long study of Boris
Rybakov about Russian paganism printed in the Journal of the Soviet Sciences
Academy. During my short stay in Moscow a “Round Table” was held in the offices
of the newspaper “Dyeïnn”, which was run by Prokhanov at that time. A press
meeting had also been organized by the tandem Dugin/Prokhanov where I was
interviewed by people from the journal “Nash Sovremennik”, who had published an
article of mine about economics. Later in September 1992 Dugin invited Jean
Thiriart, Michel Schneider, Carlo Terracciano and Marco Battarra who met the
same people as we did, plus Nikolai Baburin.
I
supposed that Benoist, who hated deeply all the people invited by Dugin and
Prokhanov in September 1992, started to tell Dugin the worst possible things
about myself and the others. In his paranoid eyes, the combined invitation was
the evidence that a “Schneiderite-Steuckersite” plot was about to succeed with
the sardonic blessing of Thiriart, whom Benoist loathed particularly, because
the Belgian animator of the former “Young Europe” movement based in Brussels
and his fellow-travelers like Bernard Garcet couldn’t stop mocking the
“would-be intellectual and narcissistic Frenchie”, who has “frail, puny and
unmuscular arms coming out of his shabby sleeves” and “who was permanently
smoking like a chimney”. Thiriart unfortunately died some weeks after his visit
to Moscow. But since then, probably due to Benoist’s gossip, I could meet Dugin
only once, in 2005, when he came to Brussels and Antwerp to address two
different meetings. Just after the Brussels’ meeting, held in the famous Coloma
Castle, Dugin took a very light meal (as it was Lent time) and jumped on the
train to Paris, as he had an appointment with Benoist. I’ve never heard of him
anymore since then. Alain de Benoist surely pursued his usual dissolving job of
chitchatting and splitting the movement, by setting the people of our own
spiritual-intellectual community at loggerheads, as if he was duly paid to do
so by some mysterious sponsors...
The
only tracks of Dugin that I can follow now are his video clips on “You tube”,
that the webmaster of “euro-synergies.hautetfort.com”, old friend Ducarme,
sometimes takes over to inform our readers about Dugin’s new activities.
As you surely know, Dugin derives his
Eurasian ideology from two main sources: Konstantin Leontiev and Lev Gumilev.
As you cannot consider Leontiev and Gumilev as pro-European thinkers, our views
are slightly different than those of Dugin: we surely admit the criticism
Leontiev and Gumilev adressed to Western thoughts when they were still alive
but as we consider ourselves as “Europeans” and not “Westerners”, we cannot
accept the equation too often made between “Europe” and the “West”. Leontiev at
his time knew that Western European liberalism was the main danger for Russia
(and for other empires, as well as for the Western European people themselves)
and wanted to isolate the Czarist Empire from the womb of subversion that
Europe was in his eyes. Gumilev thought more or less according to the same
line, adding biological views that a spiritualist like Leontiev wouldn’t have
taken into consideration. Surely in the context of the 19th Century, they were
right. But the Western subversive spirit came to Russia under the mask of
Bolshevism and remained in power for about 70 years, while the usual liberal
ideology spoilt continuously the rest of Europe. The two sides during the era
of the Cold War underwent a form or another of subversion. Now we all face a
major risk of Westernization under neo-liberal (globalist) disguise. So neither
Western-Central Europe nor the countries of the former USSR can win the battle against
subversion alone. Would Russia isolate itself according to the formerly
well-thought guidelines coined by Leontiev or Gumilev (and reproduced in a much
simpler formulation by Dugin), we Western Europeans wouldn’t play any role in
the future world struggle against subversive ideologies or would have to fight
in the limited area of the reduced Western part of the Eurasian peninsula. The
risk is to recreate a kind of new isolated Soviet Union or a renewed “Tatar
Block’ (according to the Eurasian ideology of Alexander Blok, who also spoke of
a Scythian Russia and of a Bolshevik revolution being the best embodiment of
subversion but at the head of which the opponents to subversion should place
themselves as you cannot struggle againt subversion if you don’t first take
control over it). Isolation isn’t a solution today neither for the Russians nor
for ourselves. Otherwise the worst aspects of Nazi or Nato propaganda could be
too easily reactivated.
I
expressed our vision of Eurasian or Euro-Russian solidarity in the foreword I
wrote for a book by our Croatian friend Jure Vujic about Atlanticist and
Eurasian geopolitics. The “Synergist” movement is maybe also “Scythian” but not
in the way Blok thought it was Scythian. For us the Indo-European horsemen’s
tribes, that left Eastern Central Europe with the first domesticated horses to
spread far across the Ukrainian and Central Asian steppes, are the first
historical subjects in the Eurasian areas between the present-day Western
Ukrainian borders and today’s Chinese Sinkiang or Turkestan. Eurasia was first
dominated by Indo-European people and not by Altaic or Mongolic khans. It is
true that from about 220 B.C. the Proto-Mongolic tribes united in the so-called
Xiongnu Federation, that started the movement of the Hunnic people towards the
Western areas of Eurasia and would in the run expel or annihilate politically
the Indo-European horsemen’s peoples and tribes. The Russian “reconquista” from
Ivan IV to the 19th Century is the revenge of the Indo-European people, the
cosacks’ sotnia replacing the Scyths,
Proto-Iranians, Sarmatians and Sakhians. In France, a Ukrainian historian of
protohistorical times, Iaroslav Lebedynsky, has published several very accurate
historical and archeological studies about the Indo-European horsemen’s people
that allow us to develop a specific Eurasian vision, that is slightly different
than the one coined by Dugin. The young French historian Pascal Lassalle is,
among former members of the GRECE-groups, the best present-day specialist of Lebedynsky’s
works.
